Overview / Usage

From the development side:

The fundamental goal behind forming Spicy Dice Studios and making Metamorphos was to create a team where everyone was incredibly passionate, talented, and dedicated. Spicy Dice Studios was formed by subsets of two former teams coming together and picking additional members up over the four-semester development cycle this game had. In total, 26 different students worked on this project at one point for a combined 10,000 development hours. We all came together because we wanted to make a game we would want to play and in an art style and setting we enjoyed. Creating a student game is always a challenge with balancing workloads in other classes and schedules, but I think something that caught us off guard was how much refactoring, redoing, and remaking of content, assets, and systems we had to do. We started this project halfway through our academic careers at DigiPen and as we grew and became better game developers, the work we previously made wasn't up to our new standards. This was compounded with the COVID-19 pandemic putting us into remote work midway through our second semester through the end of development. As we transitioned to remote work, we tried to recreate the in-person as much as possible by having everyone synchronously working during class hours while in a Discord server so we could easily communicate, but ran into issues as team members were spread across multiple time zones and countries. In the end, Metamorphos is the culmination of the skills cultivated and friendships formed by us at DigiPen Institute of Technology.

The design perspective:

In making Metamorphos, we wanted to make a game we love and with the highest level of polish achieveable at DigiPen Institute of Technology. Our goal was to create a simplified, tight, and polished action-RPG style combat game similar to Dark Souls in an environment and setting we wanted to explore. One of our goals was to create a unique feeling environment that didn't tie into any one culture. To do this, we used archetecture and environment references from multiple countries and regions from northern Africa and Middle Eastern regions. We also mirrored this in our narrative, pulling from Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Mesopotamian, and Sumerian mythology.

In making a game like Metamorphos, we wanted to focus on making the player feel like their overcoming a challenge and are constantly disadvantaged. To do this, we had a focus on our creature design to make the monsters in Metamorphos look, sound, and feel threatening.

While our game is inspired by Dark Souls and we have worked hard to condense that core, souls-like experience into a 15-30 minute experience, a lot of our game feel and team members were inspired by concept art done by Arthur Bates, our Creative Director. Arthur Bates made this stunning piece of this caped hero walking through a canyon towards a temple and that got a lot of the art and design team really excited to work on this project.

Technical Innovation:

• Metamorphos leverages Unity's new HDRP system, which is shown in our player respawning VFX. We wanted a fun and visually interesting effect to play when respawning, as a sort of consolation prize to the player. It seemed like a good opportunity to see how far we could push Unity’s new GPU driven particle system, VFX Graph. The hardest part of the whole effect was actually spawning the individual particles over the surface of the player. VFX Graph had no built-in method for interacting with an animated model, such as our player character. Instead of directly spawning these particles off of the player’s model, we used a temporary image of the player to drive the particle’s positions. We set it up to draw the image of the player with periodic small holes cut in their front so that their back was also visible. This image held the relevant information to tell our particles where to spawn. With that out of the way, the rest of our respawn effect was relatively straightforward.

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Design Innovation:

• Metamorphos features a fully custom-made AI system. Enemies gain Action Points over time and through player actions. They spend these Action Points on Attacks. To determine the attack to use, the enemy check it's distance from the player, angle to the player, and if it should use a special or combination attack. When attacking, the enemy dynamically tracks player in space, adjusting their angle and position to better hit the player up to a threshold.

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Audio Innovations:

• Our audio programmer, Megan Works, implemented functionality and created ‘reverb zones’ which made calls using Wwise’s game-defined auxiliary sends to switch environmental reverb according to different game locations. This helps immerse the player in the diverse environments present in Metamorphos, from dense markets, to tight interior spaces, and windy canyons.

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Methodology / Approach

This game had the major challenge of working with teammates and communication across different disciplines. We as a team knew this would be a struggle since this project was already over-scoped but we still hard committed to this vision with full force knowing we need to spend the extra hours getting things right. We had great producers that managed deadlines but still even with the best team, problems will arise and it is out job as a team to get over these hurdles.

1. Communication is not only communicated through speaking. Actions, inactions, pictures, and even hand gestures are all forms of communications so utilize them well. Something that worked well with working with artists was always having a reference material at hand to show exactly what you want or how you want it.
2. Life happens. In this case 2020 for everyone happened. Covid-19, social distancing, and many more things made this specific year awful. So let me say this and stress this enough. IT IS OKAY. Meeting deadlines is important, but asking for help when things don’t go your way is even better. Please reach out to your teammates if you feel like something is too much and lets offload that work from you.
3. My team specifically was very hard working and I have no quarrels with that. However, we also were not very social. Group bonding is maybe one of the most important things to have. So, we tried to push for bonding events after major deadlines and milestones. You learn a lot from these moments and it is honestly something more important than building games.
4. We made a Souls-like clone.** Never do this.** We are fortunate that we are in school to learn from our mistakes. For all of us, this was a learning experience. Our game copies the Dark Souls genre well, however it does not feel like Dark Souls, well it does but not exactly. Getting this feeling is one of the hardest things to do. So, I want to tell you here and now, make a game that brings novelty which means unique elements and have bits of Dark Souls here and there. Getting all the base features of a game is one of the hardest things to do.
5. To the point above, any cloned game deserves all the respect it can get. I am serious. Making a clone of something is extremely hard, so if anyone tells you, “I made a clone of this.” Give them the respect they deserve.
6. Last one, Have Fun! If you are not finding fun from what you are working, ask the producer to do a different task and then get back on the work. Having a different view point after coming back to a problem really helps.
7. Fine one more, do not be attached to the work you do, sometimes it might never be used. Okay I am done. Just Kidding.
8. Everyone, and I mean everyone needs to the play the game and take notes once a week about things they do and don’t like. This is the bug-catching machine right here. I will probably add more to this list, so for now I am done!

Technologies Used

-Unity Engine -Fondemento (font) -Cinzel (font) -The Fell Types (font) -Old Style (font) -Maya -Photoshop -Substance Designer -Substance Painter -Wwise -ZBrush

Repository

https://games.digipen.edu/games/metamorphos

Other links

• Metamorphos Game play