Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss

Project Overview

Polyarc's entry into VR competitive multiplayer. In it you select your team of 3 characters and battle against another player in a contest to see who can out-strategize the other and destroy their Glass

Work Examples

Abilities

An early prototype for the Djain's ability. This character is a gambler so I was experimenting with ways to add a sense of randomness or rolling dice to the ability

Prototype for showing the execute range of Naji's ability on enemy healthbars. This was later improved by art and set up to appear when their health fell below that threshold

This clip demonstrates work I did to implement and visualize ability channeling. I used the ability charge ui in reverse to display the remaining duration of the channeled ability. This video also shows that some channeled abilities could be set to be interrupted by stuns while others would persist through crowd control

Prototype for Sahima's bouncing chakrams auto-attack

Prototype for Sahima's ability

Final version of Sahima's auto-attacks. Logic ended up deterministic instead of random when deciding where to bounce

An almost final version of Sahima's ability. The bounce range was later reduced to 1-cell from 2 for balance

Prototype version of Mojo's pull. Video highlights the different interaction with the pull including pulling characters across gaps but not allowing them to end up in the gap

Along with the pull ability I set up an animation system for playing specific ping animations when grabbed and moved by the pull

This was the prototype version for Chetlief's lunge ability. Before this prototype his ability was a targeted stun. I created the logic for abilities that could traverse through cells and be stopped by blocking characters for this ability (this prototype was earlier than Mojo's pull)

This video highlights improvements I made to traversal abilities allowing them to pass by friendly characters if adjacent highlighted cells were open

An iteration on Djain's ability that is close to what ended up in the final version. I added a passive that had a random chance to give extra ability charge on auto-attacks. When the ability was charged it would pick semi-randomly (you can't get the same option twice in a row) between 3 effects: High Damage and a Slow, Medium Damage and an Immobilize, and Low Damage and a Stun

Combat Removal. This ability could make any character untargetable and not take damage for the duration

Position switch. This ability would switch your character's position with that of an enemy character. This video showcases using it to prevent an enemy character from escaping

Acrobat Dash. A short traversal ability that could pass through allies. The idea was to have a short cooldown on this ability and thus allow the character to be very mobile.

Skin System

I also set up a lot of the system for character skins. This included the system for how skins were stored including ways to ensure that character projectile and VFXs could change with the skin, persistent VFX placement on certain skins (ex: Vendrix flames), equipping skins in the lobby, a system for previewing skins when they were purchasable (eventually we moved away from in-game currency), as well as a workflow for artists to see their work easily in editor and in game

Video I took to show artists how to view their skins in the character's BP

Cosmetic Previews before purchase

Skin selection

Video I took to show my team that projectiles could be changed with the skins

And More!

I did some working improving the look of how characters moved through cells by generating a spline along their path and having them follow it instead of moving robotically directly from cell to cell

I also added look screens to movement so the characters would look ahead on their path as they moved

Some iteration on how we could display AoE targeting over areas that were invalid. There are multiple versions that I switch between in this video

I worked closely with one of our other engineers to get Buds Mode working. This was a mode in which a team of 2 players would work together to control the same 3 characters

I built many of the underlying Ability systems, including how movement abilities (dashes, pulls, etc) work, Area of Effect abilities, projectile behavior, execute range UI, and ability channeling. I also prototyped a lot of abilities and iterated on all of the character abilities that ended up in the final game. Below is a selection of clips from my prototypes and iterations from various stages of the game

Below are several prototypes for abilities that didn't make it into the current game but were options for future characters added later

See it on Steam