Overview / Usage

Malediction is a third-person puzzle/platformer that gives you the ability to control space and time! Play as Morgan, an impulsive, yet curious, wizard whose experiments often get him into trouble. This time, a cloning spell has backfired and his duplicates have run off with most of his magic. You must now chase them through three enchanted levels of a warped, Renaissance-inspired city. Manipulate your environment with telekinesis and localized time stop/reversal powers to overcome obstacles put before you by the dastardly clones. When you catch up to them, defeat them in battle to regain your powers.

Malediction was created by the Desert Beagle student team of the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. The project took a year to complete, or over 7000 work hours, but the effort paid off; on December 31st, 2019, we launched on Steam to generally positive reviews.

Production Team

Luis Pino, Jaime Tous

Design Team

Aaron Cendan, Steve Diezel, Carol Eastwood, Farina Khandadia, Alberto Huffman-Negron, Ryan Rusian, Sound Wright

Engineering Team

Michael Carter, Utsab Das, Dakota Dolde, Michael Fisher, John-Thomas Lascha, Junxiong Yang, Yixiang Xu, Jacob Zuch

Art Team

René Bencik, Joe Bonura, Catherine Ha, John Kim, Carolyna Marin, Zach Meyer, Alejandro Perez-Acevedo, Mary Sumner, Kim Tong, Jerry Yan, Jo Zhou

Methodology / Approach

Production

We used an Agile/Scrum framework to organize team efforts, with each team setting its own rules for what constituted completed work (e.g. the art team as a whole would review all art assets before putting them in-engine). When planning for a sprint, the leads would decide what minor milestone(s) we wanted to accomplish by the end of the sprint and assigned tasks that contributed to that goal. This allowed us to meet bigger milestones and put us on track for a Steam release. Task tracking was done through Jira and Excel, with the data collected used to plot out production trends, allowing us to react to production dips before they became an issue.

Design

Our design process began by learning one thing each team member really wanted to work on; from "AI" to "painting with light," we made it a goal to include as many of these desires into our game concept. We wanted to encourage early buy-in by having the team feel they had a part in the design process, rather than have the game designed behind closed doors and delivered to them from on-high. More importantly, however, it encouraged creativity by setting constraints. "Animating an eccentric character" necessitated our game have a visible character, which narrowed our choices in genres, but led us to create Morgan, a character we all grew to adore. "Physics-based puzzles" further refined our genre choices, but was the springboard for the idea of combining push/pull physics with time manipulation.

We knew we were asking a lot from the players by giving them multiple powers. When it came to level design, we approached this concern with the philosophy of "teach them what they need to succeed." We'd first decide what powers they would have for a given level, followed by coming up with as many possible use-cases for each power. We then designed as many independent puzzles as possible that applied these use-cases. We then evaluated each puzzle on three criteria:1) "Does it teach the player something new/build on existing knowledge?" 2) "Is the solution reasonable?" 3) "Is it fun?" Once the pool of puzzles had been trimmed down, we finally placed them together in a way that made them feel like they naturally followed one another.

Technologies Used

General Tools: Unreal Engine 4, Perforce, Jira, FMOD, MS Office, Slack

Engineer Tools: Visual Studio, C++

Art Tools: Maya, Houdini, Photoshop, ZBrush

Other links

• Steam Store Page
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