Welcome, spirits, new and old, to the third of our dev logs. This time, we are going back and talking about Wukong and his gameplay design.
Prefer to watch?
Join the team as they talk about Wukong and his gameplay design in the video below:
As previously mentioned during the character design dev log, he is a character of worldwide popularity with many stories surrounding him, meaning we had to make him feel like the character you know. This meant we had to make gameplay feel like he had the traits you would expect of him, and use those as our inspiration for designing the hero's gameplay.
To begin with, we wanted to showcase him as the master fighter he is, with an arsenal of weapons at his disposal. The idea was to build him to scale damage, hit hard, and be durable enough to take a good hit or two.
To do this, we knew we wanted to focus on accessories, either to scale damage or health. When these are connected to the Hero Tile, Wukong himself, it would increase his health, which can help you survive those early rounds. His character tiles encourage chain attack abilities, or, in the case of Seven Star Sword, begin with a chain attack. These abilities combine well with specific accessories to provide that scaling health and damage throughout a fight to make you feel like Wukong is this master fighter who gets stronger the longer a fight goes on.
Another trait that he has is the ability to revive and potentially even become stronger because of that, so, we thought of a way to try and bring that into the game itself through tiles and trinkets that provide revives, and accessories that buff items dependant on tiles being revived, so you have this master warrior who can, if played correctly, get stronger through tiles being destroyed and revived over and over again!
At the same time, he’s known to be a bit of a trickster, which you could argue is something that is quite hard to bring into a game like ours, but, we think we’ve brought a little of that into his game design by creating a keyword called confusion, meaning, when you apply confusion to an attack tile, that tile will hit a completely random tile. It could hit yourself, or your opponent or even itself, which can lead to amusing situations where, through confusion, the opponent's hero tile attacks itself, bringing them to 0 hp and you winning!
The Ultimates.
Wukong can also shapeshift, which is another trait we wanted to bring into the game. The best we thought of was using it as one of his ultimates - where he turns into a dragon and hits the battlefield. Not only is this impactful, especially early on, but we also knew we had to get the VFX right for it. For this, we needed to make the dragon look almost 3d, so we had the dragon come out and do a little loop-de-loop on the way to its target.
Another thing Wukong has been known to do, which is where we drew the inspiration from, is a technique called “Cloud Somersault” where he can travel vast distances in a single leap, in our version, we decided that this act would allow him to steal charges from his opponents tiles and power up his own, meaning not only did we reference one of his abilities but also eluded to his trickster ways!
Abilities
Another direction we decided to take, at least for the first and third of his shop abilities, is the fact that he can also clone; in the myth, it was primarily himself. Still, we decided it would be fun to allow players to duplicate items on their board, or, in the future, be able to clone weapons that your opponent has, which would allow you to steal a weapon that you usually would not have access to!
And finally, the second ability is a reference to his journey to gain wisdom, which we decided to add into our game as an ability where you receive a scroll of wisdom, which, in turn, when used correctly, can empower attack tiles that require charges, allowing them to act quicker.
That’s all for now
Thank you again for following us on this journey so far! Be sure to follow and join our social channels for more info:
Stay spooky and safe
The 1TK team.