Revenge of Quaternius
Designer, Programmer, and Artist
Screenshots
Overview
Revenge of Quaternius is an action puzzler centered around the warrior mage Quaternius who seeks to avenge his fallen mage order against an evil king. His power comes from his skill with a sword along with a technique known as Gimbal Lock, a play on the term used for freezing along a specific directional axis. Any damage taken in this game, for both enemies and the player, is fatal. Quaternius can do an attack in one of four directions with his sword and can also use his Gimbal Lock ability to slow time and force an enemy to turn towards a certain direction for a few seconds. The locking can be used to make enemies move away from the player to relieve pressure, have archer enemies shoot other archers, or even make melee enemies walk into a bed of lethal spikes. The Gimbal Lock ability is unlocked by killing enemies but the player can only hold one charge of it at a time. The player moves through progressively more difficult levels, fighting sword-wielding knights, charging spearmen, and deadly archers. The player completes a level and can move through a gate to the next level when all enemies are defeated in the current stage.
Contributions
I worked in a team of three to create this game. I was the main designer on the project as I designed the combat, Gimbal Lock mechanic, and levels. I also made some art and wrote the majority of the game’s story. For this game, I took the opportunity to improve upon my melee system from Red Sand. I was able to use Unity’s animation system in order to modify the position of hitboxes each frame as well as choose whether or not the hitboxes were active or not. This enabled me to create startup and recovery frames for enemies, which allows the player to outmaneuver and punish them for missing their attacks. I also tried to combine the Gimbal Lock and melee systems in order to make the gameplay more engaging. The most efficient way to play is killing an enemy and then using the Gimbal Lock before killing another one since only one charge of the ability is stored at a time. This was intended to create a rhythm of slashing, locking, slashing, and so on. I also intended for the Gimbal Lock to allow for unique interactions such as making archers shoot each other or using the technique to rotate enemies who are only vulnerable from the back. Not all of these ideas are in the current version of the game since it is a prototype, but I think there is a great deal of room to expand these mechanics.
Reflections/Design Thoughts
I was very happy to be able to properly implement melee combat in a way that used ideas I learned from my years of playing fighting games. The nuances of the system make combat a bit more interesting than just mashing the attack button. Attacks from knights and the player cause movement to halt. This forces the player to time their attacks properly in order to ensure that they hit enemies or risk getting hit by those same foes as they move towards the player. The startup frames on knight attacks telegraph the move to the player, allowing for counter play through movement and whiff punishing. This is because the recovery frames on the knight’s swing allows the player to recognize the knight’s missed swing and then perform a retaliatory attack in response. This is also helped by the player’s attack being active on their very first frame, making it feel snappy and rewarding for players who properly dodge enemy attacks. I think some numbers still need tweaking and more enemies and interactive terrain pieces would enhance the gameplay experience. I believe the puzzle aspect of the game would also benefit from such changes. Limiting the strength of Gimbal Lock further would likely also result in a more interesting experience overall as it is currently quite easy to access the ability. Additionally, the hitbox on the player’s slash attack could also be tweaked to be less generous as it’s range is currently quite forgiving. In exchange, enemies could have more startup and recovery on attacks which would still give the player adequate to react to enemy actions despite having a shorter range on their sword strikes.
In future games, I think that adding a defensive mechanic to combat would be a great addition and I look forward to experimenting with such a system in the future. As a final thought, level design could also be more focused in such a way as to push the player to using Gimbal Lock to solve combat puzzles in order to progress because as of right now, the game could theoretically be beaten without the ability and this is a flaw in the game’s design.
