The Arcane Turret

Overview

Made with: Basic Unreal setup + tools. Effects from “Infinity blade: Effects” and “Infinity Blade: Ice Lands” on UE Marketplace.

Main focus: Level & Gameplay design

Context: Players come across an arcane turret with several elemental defense utilities that it cycles through: fire, ice and “stomp” (earth). They can damage it with their attacks and spells and bring it down over time, but they also need to endure and survive: avoid dangers, avoid accidentally killing each other, be mindful of where they are standing to stay in control of the map.

This is a prototype for a co-op scenario in a top-down game, e.g. a MOBA type of genre.

The challenge and difficulty is less from the turret itself, but more from the chaos of playing with other people. The idea is to utilise something all player characters share, no matter what role they are or whether they are ranged/melee type— in this case, using their position as the main component in how the gameplay unravels.

  • Players will be targeted at random by fire bombs and fire rays, and wherever they land, the ground underneath will ignite and spawn fire.

  • Ice bombs and ice cones clear fire, but will also root your teammates in place if hit.

  • Stomp does massive damage and stuns players within its danger zone (the two inner circles).

  • Avoid the Stomp: this will only affect the two inner circles, so the outer circle is a safe spot.

  • Avoid standing in fire and avoid getting hit by ice effects.

  • The amount of fires will slowly build up over time, but the ice events can clear fire away.

Using Ice events to help

Ice events root players to the spot, and when stomp comes, rooted players will be unable to escape. Melee players might especially cause chaos here as they are both closer and thus will move the ice cone much faster, and are generally more in the thick of things and closer to their teammates.

Meanwhile, using Ice events are also the only way to clear fire out, and so the targeted player should position themselves strategically for that.

Keep outer circle safe

When Stomp eventually comes around, the only safe spot (the outer circle) needs to be clear of fire, so the players can hang out there until Stomp is over.

Strategy:

  • Avoid letting the fire build up in the outer circle; only one of the two ice events can reach it, so it’s much harder to clear that area.

  • It may be tempting for ranged players to stay in the outer circle most of the fight, but if they get targeted by fire events, it’ll keep building up fire there, which will become a problem over time.


How to play

Ice Cone (event 5)

The ice elemental events are Ice bomb and Ice cone, event 4 and 5 respectively.

This also calls a separate class that handles the function here.

IceConeSpawn:

The first bits are once again mostly for visuals; a danger zone will spawn and track and follow the targeted player’s location and “blink” near the end of the duration, so the danger zone and timing are clear.

At the end there’s a freeze check, and any player who is colliding with the danger zone becomes frozen or rooted in place for a few seconds.

StompSpawn:

First it starts a light screen shake and some visual effects to make it clear to the player where the danger zone is and how much time they have to get out of it.

The important part is the stun check near the end; any player that is colliding with the danger zone at the point will be hit by the stun effect and take a lot of damage (or die).

Fire ray (event 3)

Blueprints & setup

Created with basic Unreal setup + tools. Effects from “Infinity blade: Effects” and “Infinity Blade: Ice Lands” on UE Marketplace.

This was made based on the built in top-down character you can start with in UE5.

Overall it’s very modular and encapsulated, functions and blueprints get spawned and called in rather than always existing.

The turret activates (overview)

The tower has a box collision around it, and when a player walks into it, the cycle begins.

Event loop start:

Turret goes through 3 elemental events in semi-random order before finishing the loop with “event 1”: the “stomp” event.

Semi random: Event 2 and 3 are fire focused while event 4 and 5 are ice focused, so I used a flip flop to make sure there’s a balance there.

Stomp (event 1)

The heaviest and most damaging of the turret’s utilities; the gameplay centres around this and whether the players can successfully avoid it

Event 1: Spawns a separate class (stomp spawn) that handles this event (after double checking that one does not already exist).

The fire elemental events are the Fire bombs & Fire rays, event 2 and 3, respectively.

Much like the stomp event, event 3 starts by calling a separate class that handles this function.

FireRaySpawn:

The fire ray works by spawning a hidden AI (the Trailmarker) that follows the targeted player. For a set time it continuously spawns a new fire on the ground at its location (Firestarter). First it double checks whether it should, as it will only spawn a new fire if there isn’t already a fire nearby or if it hasn’t recently spawned one.