Let me proudly present my own take on the top-down RPG genre, combined with features from my favourite game-series Dark Souls! 

What started as a small free-time project evolved into four months of dedication, refining gameplay mechanics and mastering the implementation of Diablo-like features. However, this isn't just another mob-grinding RPG. My goal was to create a challenging and punishing experience inspired by Dark Souls, where strategy and precision are key. By incorporating a rolling mechanic, players must carefully plan their moves and dodge enemies to survive, making every encounter a test of skill and reflexes.

Features overview

Point to click

Hold or click the mouse button to move the character to that position.

• Gets the mouse input position on the NavMesh everytime you click
  
  • Sets the bool "isMoving" to true when pressing, and sets it to false when releasing
• Moves player to that position
  • In case mouse raycast hits an interactable object, it runs a HandleInteraction() function instead
  • Gets the center point of that object and moves the player there

Move() runs while isMoving is true

In case mouse hit is Interactable

Buffered input

To make the game more responsive, I have implemented a "buffered input"-system. While doing an attack or performing a roll, the player can hit a key which performs another action during the current one, and when the current action is finished it queues the action the player has pressed.

• Every action stores 2 floats:
  • A float which represents the time required for the moment he starts the action, to the point when it is ready for another input
  • The other float represents the time for when the buffered input is ready to perform
• The PlayerInput script includes all functions for handling the different inputs
  • It is structures in a way that it first checks if player can do action at all
  • Then it checks if player is ready for another input
  • If that is false, is then checks if player is already doing an action, and if that is false, it then performs the action that the function is meant for
• The PlayerMovement script stores three bools that checks if:
  • hasBufferedRoll
  • hasBufferedAttack
  • hasBufferedMovement

Roll mechanic

When pressing space, the player performs a roll.

• The roll mechanic is divided into four main functions:
  • RollStart()
    • First it clears any previous attacks (if performing)
    • Then it gets the mouse position which will be the direction of the roll
    • Then it disables the NavMesh agent
    • Then triggers the animation
  • RollUpdate()
    • This is used to handle any buffered input during different time marks of the roll
  • RollEnd()
    • Resets the NavMesh and warps the NavMeshAgent Y position to the current Y position
  • OnAnimatorMove()
    • The player position of the roll is handled by the animation itself
    • It sets the player position to the Animator delta position
    • It does a raycast to the ground and lerps the Y-value to that, so that the player can roll up and down stairs
• It also has a function that checks if the player is colliding with wall
  • In that case, it ends the roll and goes back to idle
    

Result

Three different attacks 

For this section, I want to show the three unique attacks that the boss has, since the boss otherwise share the same base behaviour as the other enemies do. The boss attacks consists of a combo attack, a jump attack and a ranged attack that makes it rain rocks from the sky.

Jump attack 

The JumpAttack script works in a similar way that the roll mechanic for the player does. It lets the animation handle the movement. In the previous state/event, it checks if the boss is within a certain distance of the player, and in that case it either performs a jump attack or a ranged attack depending on the RNG. 

float jumpAttackDistance = 4f;

float comboAttackDistance = 2f;

These two floats are used to decide if the enemy should do a combo attack (the previous one) or a jump/ranged distance.

Now onto the script itself:

Ranged attack 

In this attack, the boss makes it rain rocks from the sky. Before the rocks hit the ground, it shows indicators of where the rocks are going to land, so that the player has some time to dodge them. The first rock will always be above the player, so that the player has to move either way to not get hit.

It has three variables:

Choose your path 

At the skill tree's current state, it only has five different types of passive skills in total. The skill types consists of damage increase, health increase, defense increase, mana increase and attack speed increase. Despite that, I have big plans for the skill tree in the future, and it is going to play a large part in what makes the game enjoyable. There will be a lot more stats that will be affected by different skills, and the player will be able to choose a lot more paths in what way he/she wants to take the character. Here is a list of skills that I plan to add in the future:

Get skill points by leveling up 

I have made a level system that applies for all characters in game (both player and enemies). Each time the player levels up he gets a skill point that he can spend to achieve a passive skill. For the enemies it works a little different though. For each level the enemy has, it multiplies all its stats by 1.2. That makes it easily scalable for future levels where the enemies should be harder, and it's easy to reuse already existing enemies and just increase their level to match the level's difficulty which will save a lot of time during development. With that said, I will of course introduce new enemies as the game goes on.

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Inventory screen

The inventory screen consists of 30 inventory slots, 5 equipment slots and 5 action slots. InventorySlot is the parent script of all the other slot types, and is where most of the inventory logic is handled. Each of the inventory slots stores an ItemSO, and the player is limited to place item's in different slot types depending on what item type it is. For example, you can not put an action item in an equipment slot, and you can't put a non-action item in an action slot.

To move around item's, I've implemented a drag and drop-mechanic. The InventorySlot script has three inferfaces included: IBeginDragHandler, IDragHandler and IEndDragHandler. Each of these has a function for when the player is beginning to drag, during drag and end of the drag. To make the item icon follow the mouse when dragging, I have removed the sprite from its parent and placed at the mouse position during drag, and when dropped, it shoots a raycast from the mouse position and depending on what inventory slot it hits, it is placed in that slot by setting the current inventory slot to null, and the targeted inventory slot to this inventory slot. The sprite becomes a child of the previous slot again, but is set to null, and the sprite of the new inventory slot is changed to the new one.

I also have implemented a mechanic to easily switch items with each other. This was the trickiest part in the whole game to get right, in my opinion. There was a thousand stuff to keep track off, since a lot of bugs occured where you could for example switch an item from the equipment slot with an item in the normal inventory slots. That made the player being able to equip a health potion for example, if he switched it with an armour piece. So, I had to set a lot of restrictions to in what moments the switch was going to be successful, or where the item's should go back to their original places. On top of that, I also had to keep track of when the stats of the armour pieces should be applied and when they should be removed.

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ProjectileSpawner

• Has a Vector3 offset for where to spawn the projectile
• Has two functions that are called from the animation, one with an offset and one without
• SpawnProjectile() gets called from both of the previous stated functions
  
• Spawns the projectile from the object pool
• Spawn position is different depending on if the bool "offset" is true or false

ChainToClosestEnemy

• Makes a new array of gameobject with a total number of maxChains (5)
• Gets the closest enemy
• Adds closest enemy to chainedEnemies list
• Sets the startPosition to closest enemy position
• Sets the position count of the lineRenderer to chainedEnemies count + 1 (the player)
• Sets position of lightRenderer to closestEnemy position
• Spawns lightning particle effect from object pool
• Calculates ability damage