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The Swarm

Pre-alpha

The Swarm was a game design concepted and developed at Sheridan College by Joseph Ballantyne and Joseph Ryder.

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The core goal of the Swarm is to acquire insane weaponry and fight an enumerable enemy over a course of waves. Each wave structured into two separate sections of play; the hunt stage where the player actively seeks out the swarm in order to kill enemies and acquire upgrades for the hunted stage. The second stage begins when the swarm has sufficiently replicated reaching critical mass.

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At this stage the player becomes the hunted and must now actively defend themselves from the swarm. Drops are disabled and the players fight for survival begins. The wave ends when the swarm is completely purged from the map. In order to do this the player must defeat several marked enemies, each marked enemy defeat lowering the spawn rate of Swarmers until it reaches 0 and the swarm can be eradicated.

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My Contributions

 

> Programmed and Implemented all Core Mechanics and Features
 

> Gameplay Design for Weapons, Loot, Combat, and Core Loop

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> Weapon and Loot Drop, Damage, and Upgrade Balancing

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Weapon Design

Upgrade and Weapon Rarity

Weapons and Upgrades all come in 5 different drop tiers, eventually the goal is that as the player progresses through the game new tiers are unlocked allowing a smooth progression to the strongest weaponry and upgrades in the game.

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Weapon damage scales linearly with the tier of the weapon.

 

Damage = base * tier

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Damage is then further enhanced by a variety of weapon modifiers that can roll on each drop in varied sets and strengths, each modification type with its own rarity.

Weapon And Upgrade Mods

Beyond just the base damage value scaling weapons and upgrades also scale their mods with a minimum mod count, as well as a maximum mod count. As weapons increase in rarity their maximum modification count lowers, as most modifications scale multiplicatively with the damage bonus from weapon tier. 

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To compensate for this the minimum number of mods goes up with weapon and upgrade tier, effectively guaranteeing better minimum results with drops. The goal of this system is to allow a well maximum normal weapon to remain competitive with higher tier weapons through mass upgrade installation.

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Tiers and Their Effect on Modifications

Tiers have a drastic effect on the strength of the base modification rolls of an upgrade and a weapon. 

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As weapons increase in tier so does the number of modifications that can roll on them at base, as well as the "depth" of these mods.

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Depth refers to the number of times a modifier will be stacked with itself. In order to roll depth a random value between 0 and the maximum depth will be rolled, and then multiplied into the base modifier value. This makes lowers the probability of getting perfect rolls on weapons significantly thus allowing and motivating players to chase for the perfect weapon drops almost infinitely.

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Mod Value = Mod Base Value * Random(0, Max Modification Depth)

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Two Upgrade Free Legendary Drops

Chasing the Perfect Weapon

In effect the pursuit of a perfect weapon involves many different stages for a player and would involve them taking into account a limited inventory of 3 slots, wherein they can store their weapons and upgrade them as well as swap between during play. 

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For a player to construct a theoretically perfect weapon they must first drop a weapon with maximum mod depth rolls of legendary Teir, with the maximum possible available mod slots, then they must drop legendary upgrades whose modifiers are not redundant with one another and the weapon they are modifying. Finally they must ensure across all these upgrades they do not exceed the multishot or lyuda cap as it would result in the weapon have inefficient upgrade installations. 

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Weapon / Upgrade Modification Types

Damage | Rate of Fire : The Classics

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Cannon Count : Exclusive to weapons and exclusive to legendary weapons, allows them to roll with one additional cannon. 

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Multishot : Number of additional projectiles fired by this weapon per projectile. I.E. multiplicative of base projectile count. 

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Lyuda : Projectiles split after 50% of their maximum range. Lyuda is stored as a float value, allowing the number of projectiles projectiles split into to scale to a cap.

Explosive : Projectiles explode out of the back of their targets creating deadly shrapnel.

Penetration : Projectiles penetrate through multiple targets, allows explosive to proc on multiple enemies. 

Wiggle : Weapons while firing experience extreme jitter spraying haphazardly across the screen, in return the player receives a large (tunable) amount of multiplicative fire rate. 

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Enemy AI Design

Enemy Behavior

Enemies are designed to have a variety of behaviors depending on the global population of the swarm. 

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The Swarm Progresses through 4 states of aggression as the game progresses.

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Avoidant : During this phase the swarm actively paths to navigation nodes furthest from the player, and attempts to avoid the player at all costs. 

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Passive : Ignores and disregards the players position and actions for the most part, actively seeking out zones for boosted replication. 

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Aggressive : Actively routes toward nodes near the player and attacks on sight.

Hyper-Aggressive (Critical Mass Exclusive) : Swarms towards the player, utilizing specialized navigational nodes the follow the player. Attacks continuously and replicates at twice the current base rate. 

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USING AI TO PROVIDE MEANINGFUL PLAYER CHOICE

The goal of the various different enemy states is to provide a sense of ebb and flow to the gameplay of the swam both during waves and over the course of a play session. 

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The primary goal is to provide an overarching experience of increasing intensity. This occurs not only in the core loop the player experiences during a wave, but also as waves progressively increase in difficulty. 

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The main source of the ebb and flow within waves is the hunt and hunted states the player gets to experience on account of the AI behavior states. During the hunting phase the player is able to upgrade, and can seek out enemies at their leisure to kill and receive upgrades, each enemy killed increasing the time before critical mass. If they wish to the player can also not kill any enemies allowing the swarm to reach critical mass faster then before.

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We went with this design direction because we feel it provides the player a significant amount of control over their play experience, and they can essentially plan how either difficult or hard the section of the game when they lack control (critical mass) is. We wanted to have a sense of give and take whenever the player took an action in order to promote a sense of fairness, even when putting the player into difficult situations; they got themselves there through a series of choices and trades in relation to how they spent their time prior.

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Minor Swarmers

Minor Swarmers swarm around a major swarmer and will therefore effectively share that major Swarmers behavior. 

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They come in two varieties Ranged and Melee. Melee Swarmers will charge the player and detonate on impact dealing damage, whereas ranged will attack from a distance damaging the player. 

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Major Swarmers

Major Swarmers attack the player from a range and are where the majority of the complex AI behavior is realized. They route differently depending on the players state as well as the swarm state, and will choose where and when the minor Swarmers attack via. positioning and other effects.

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