TL; DR
Resonant Souls was a 2-months marathon project on Unreal Engine to be submitted to a game-creation contest with a high cash prize to be gained.
Although it did not win, it’s been a very intensive and interesting experience, and taught me and my associate a lot.
About the game
Resonant Souls was a 2 month ARPG prototype made in 2016 with my WTVR games associate, who was in charge of 3D and 2D art. It was made to be an entry at Magic Monaco video game making contest, with a €100.000 cash prize to develop the full game. Unfortunately, we did not win the prize, and probably for the best, since the scope of the project largely superseded that amount.
We were young and naive 😮💨sigh.
This complete introductory 2 levels demo follows July, an inhabitant of a desertic world that is trapped in a never ending day, while she follows a mysterious figure, helped by her twin soul’s internal voice, Oswald, coming from a world trapped in a never ending night.
The game features rather clumsy action combat (we did all this in 2 months after all!), and Golden-Sun inspired puzzle solving. It was supposed to feature tactical combat as well, but the dynamic pathfinding required to make it work was buggy and, submission being upon us, we decided to cut that content from the prototype.
The game graphics are from 2015 so please be indulgent, since both the hardware and our skills have evolved a lot since then.
My work on the project
I made the lore of the game, and the whole code in Unreal Engine 5 (well, Unreal Engine 4, really, but my skill page is labeled 5) in C++ and Blueprint .
I also made the music, with 5 variations that blended smoothly into each other :
- Desert Exploration theme
- A calmer dialogue variation
- A rock-inspired action combat variation
- A temple variation
- An elevator music version (if you want to know why, you’ll have to play the demo!)
This was my second project in UE, and this made me discover dynamic pathfinding and navigation meshes, navigation links and the like, as well as Unreal AI and behavior trees.
In order to have the game run smoothly with no loading times between levels, we also used dynamic level instances to load/unload level parts as the player progressed.
World partition was not an option at the time! 😉
This was a great opportunity to challenge our skills and learn a lot more about UE, skills that we could then transfer to our main project at the time, B4C : Schrödinger Warfare.
We made a PDF explainer to present the whole game concept (🇫🇷)
If you want to know more, you can also play the prototype (windows)
