Umbral Arena

Role: Game Designer | Programmer | QA Tester

Tools: GameMaker Studio | Aseprite 

About

Umbral Arena is a 2D fighting game where two players start with the same abilities and are afforded the opportunity to swap around their abilities in between rounds. Each match rotates between three phases: Combat, Farming, Setup. In these phases players Battle, find new abilities and upgrades, and swap their skills around and battle again with a new ability set.

Background 

The game began as a class assignment amongst a group of 3 students which was further developed after the completion of the assignment. The project was designed to answer design questions that we had about games before we started creating the game. One of those questions being if ranged moves belonged in fighting games or is it a system players would abuse. The answer we came up with is that when we had projectiles that were too slow players would not use them since they were easy to dodge, on the flip side if they were too fast players would keep their distance and not use any melee attacks. To combat the conundrum we refined the speeds of the projectiles and made the strong ranged moves need some setup to do while others were more utility and made to create a space or give the player a way to escape(such as more slow moving projectiles shooting in every direction making the opponent need to move differently to get the player).