Primaeval - 3rd person fantasy action adventure game

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Primaeval is a 3rd person action Adventure dungeon crawler game featuring interactive logic puzzles and engaging melee and magic combat system.

Melee Combat System
The game adopts a tactical real time physics based melee combat system with wide range of attacks and moves, where the player has the full control of his character, both successful and failure attacks have their respective consequences. in addition, the game features several types of weapons each with it’s own play style.

With 3 types of attacks ( normal, heavy and ultra) player can perform several attack combos as some attacks can be chained together depending on the player’s hand position at the end of the first attack and the start of the second one.

The melee combat system was designed to give the player a fairly rewording and fun experience, the bloody flying limbs of your enemies will guarantee you having great moments of excitements.


Magic Combat System
The magic system in Primaeval is a symbol based system and heavily relies on the player’s memory , a magic spell may be represented by one or more symbols written on magic scrolls. during combat, the player has to remember the correct symbol that represents the spell he wishes to cast and draw it quickly to activate the spell, otherwise the player will need to reopen the scroll and waist a precious time.


Artificial Intelligence
AIs in Primaeval were designed to be challenging and merciless, a horde of enemies wont’ tackle the player one by one but instead they’ll attack together whenever it’s possible and it’s up to the player to tactically choose the best gameplay style to deal with this situation depending on his current equipments, skills and weapons.


Puzzles
Primaeval has many of logical and mechanical puzzles designed to tease the player’s brain and sometimes frustrate him!

Over the past 3 months I've made 3 updates videos but since I haven't created any WIP thread till now I'm going to post all of those update videos at once in separate posts!

Please Consider voting for Primaeval in the Indie of the Year Awards!


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The first update shows the Sharp weapons combat. However, the visuals are a bit outdated compared to the next two videos

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Primaeval Update #2: Blunt Weapons

This update shows the Blunt weapon combat implementation and some animation and graphics improvements.

Blunt weapons have their own play style, They are slow and cost more stamina but they deal more damage and have bigger impact on the enemy.

New animations

• 2 Rolling animations.
• New dodge back animation.
• Some improvements to other attack animations

Improvements to the melee combat system

• player now stumble when missing heavy attacks.
• ability to block with weapons.

Graphical improvements

• Optimized shadows.
• Bloom effect.
• 9 pieces armor set for goblins, each goblin procedurally gets different pieces of the armor set.
• Randomized armor

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Plus tons of bug fixes and technical optimizations.

 

Primaeval Update #3: Magic Combat – Ice & Fire



The 3rd update is here and it’s all about Magic!​

For this update I’ve spent too much time trying to find a convenient way to integrate the magic combat system with the melee one, my goal was to give the player the ability to use both of magic spells and melee weapons and seamlessly switch between them.

The main problem is that the character wont be able to move during the process of entering the magic state because it will be playing the ritual animation and this will leave player exposed to all sorts of enemy attacks so to tackle that issue I've tried several ideas:

1) Reduce the entering process time by speeding up the ritual animation, didn't help that much as the player still exposed to enemies.

2) protect the player with some kind of magic shield during the entering process. now the player is no longer exposed to enemies but entering process is still slowing down the combat pace.

3) Do some extra animation work and blend the ritual animation with navigation ones to allow the player to move freely during the entering process. by combining all of these ideas I got pretty satisfying result.

So in this Update I show the magic system in action and some other minor improvements

Symbol based magic system

• A magic spell may be represented by one or more symbols written on magic scrolls (more details in future updates).player has to remember the correct symbol that represents the spell he wishes to cast and draw it quickly to activate that magic spell.
• Magic spell caching enables quick spell switching so player can strategically plan thier spells combos and attacks.
• Smooth transition between Magic and Melee combat states keeps the flow of the over all combat engagement.
• 2 magic spells Fire and Ice with one symbol for each

more info about the magic system will be revealed in future updates


Some minor improvements:

• New “belt” system enables back sheathing secondary weapons and shields
• Sparks on weapons colliding
• Dust on blocking weapon with shield
• New sword shader
• New slaughter animation

That was all for this update, hope you like it and stay tuned for more.

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That was it for now hope you like it, please feel free to give any feedback or suggestions!

 

This looks awesome! The attention to the animation transitions are smooth and evident. Great job. The fx are also top quality.
The movement of the main character (scraping metal) seemed to be a little over done. I think that sound would become aggravating over time. Maybe consider toning that sound down a little bit.
Does the character movement sounds change based on his armor/clothing load out?

Keep at it. You have very nice attention to detail.

 

Looks bloody brilliant to me, you're animations are spot on, and it all looks very smooth. Your effort at keeping it realistic, like the stumbling with a missed heavy weapon swing is a breath of fresh air, and your sound effects are well done, it already feels/sounds like there is real weight behind the melee combat moves. Keep up the good work, and know that I am jealous of your talent

 

Nice stuff!

 

impression. i like the melee part you have done.

I'm eager to see how you handle the 2 hands sword combat part. the 2 hand sword like the sword in conan's old movie, it have wide blade, and shorter than normal medieval long sword, like some of viking's sword.
I wonder how nice you may make it block , dodge and attack. normal attack, heavy attack, ultra attack, and several combo attacks. and maybe a unique one.

 

Thank you! yes the movement sounds change based on the number and type of the equipped armor pieces, the more pieces the louder it gets!

 

Thank you! glad you like my work

 

Glad you like it!

Actually 2 hands sword is already on the waiting list! I'm just waiting to be in the right mood for animating currently I'm busy improving some game logic.

 

Superb game, the spell effects and sounds are just great.
You should change the goblins cries, there are cheap, not so good and used in many indies stuffs alreay
A lock/deslock target system like Dark soulds would help a lot fighting.

 

Thank you! I agree with you about the goblins cries. However, I can't see how A lock/deslock target system would be helpful especially that the combat system is physics based thus the enemies don't need to be programmatically targeted to take damage, it would be great if you can elaborate a bit more

 

You have to play dark souls, you can lock ennemies to turn around and deslock when you want to do any moves freely like in your game.
Look at 3:55 combat boss
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZClb8d8484

 

Very nice! Liked on facebook.

 

Ah got it! This feature has been also available in an old game called Severance: Blade of darkness, it would be a nice addition, thank you!

 

Thank you!

 

modar this looks amazing. Very very well done.

 

Very cool! Do you plan on multiplayer and pvp?

 

Nice work! Im a big fan of realistic combat aswell and Im trying to archive that in my game.
How do you do the knockback when you/they are hit?

 

yup, the lighting and visuals are good. animations on point. i know this is not related but how do you put such a video together ... like the primaeval intro effects.

 

Thank you!

 

Yes I'm planing for a multiplayer mode, I'll talk more about that in a future update!

 

I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly, but it's just a mixingtransform'ed animation

 

Thank you, I use sonyvegas for that

 

Neat! I've been working on a game by myself for a while now with a similar magic system, but a little different.

In the event I ever finish it (fat chance), I'm going to post this here with the date of the post (9 months ago) just so you don't think I was ripping off your game, haha:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wip-small-works-game-programming-thread.146445/page-14#post-1560863

 

Yeah thats what I do aswell. Just wondered if you did something special

 

LOL, it's a similar idea indeed but with a very different implementation!

 

Primaeval Update #4: Two-Handed Swords Combat


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In this update I show the implementation of Two-Handed Swords in addition to AI, combat and graphical improvements.

Two-Handed Swords are extremely slow and consume a lot of stamina, on the other hand they deal great damage with high limb slicing chance and cannot be disarmed, in addition they have a disabling impact on the enemy, meaning whenever a character takes a Two-handed sword hit it will be disabled for a short period of time.

Blocking Two-handed sword attack with a weapon has additional stamina cost, this gives Two-handed swords a great disarming ability as the disarming occurs when blocking an attack with a weapon while the stamina is lower than a specific threshold AND the attacker’s stamina at the same time.

Obviously a shield cannot be used along with Two-Handed Swords, but with the right timing Two-Handed Swords can efficiently be used to block enemies attacks. however, this become more difficult when engaging with more than one enemy.

Combat improvements​

1. 2 Handed sword implementation.
2. Health magic spell: can only be casted on enemies that are in disabled state.
3. Disarming feature: disarming occurs when blocking an attack with a weapon while the stamina is lower than a specific threshold AND the attacker stamina at the same time.
4. Kick animation.

Graphical improvements​

1. custom character shader.
2. animated bleeding wounds on character’s body, the wounds are aligned with the direction of the received hit.

AI improvements​

1. implementing disarming feature for AI.
2. AI can use any weapon of any type.
3. when disarmed AI will pick up the closest weapon of any type.
4. more flexible and adjustable AI behavior.
5. improved collision detection prevents AI from occasional overlapping with other objects.

That was all for this update, hope you like it and stay tuned.

Please Consider voting for Primaeval in the Indie of the Year Awards!
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Awesome

 

Hey modar your game is awesome! I think the blood and bleeding is implemented very well.

If I may critique the 2 handed sword animations, the upper body doesn't show enough weight before (load up to swing the big heavy sword) and after the swings (over swing / follow through because the sword is heavy).

May be something you want to touch up in one of your updates.

Keep up the awesome work. You have a winner in the making.

 

Thank you!

 

Thank for the feedback, and I agree with you, some of the animations need to be polished a bit more, actually I had to publish this update even with these animations in order to get the voters attention in the IoFTY competition!

Glad you like the blood effect!