Flambé

Tools: Unreal Engine, Perforce, Miro

Flambé is a minion-crafting combat game where you battle through hoardes of living food ingredients in order to cook them into minions. I worked as producer and tech lead, created a majority of the gameplay systems and organized weekly sprints.

The game features two playable stages, the Forest and Cave, both with unique environments, enemies, and encounters to discover while unlocking recipes.

Combat System

Section one Section one Section one

Goals

The goal of Flambé's combat system was to create a blend of minion control and hack-n-slash melee combat.

We took inspiration from Hades' top down combat with dash, combo attacks, and different weapons. The target was fast-paced strategic combat and a healthbar that requires you to monitor it.

The goal of the minions was to take inspiration from the Overlord and Pikmin series of games and create a satisying blend of combat and minions. The player creates and collects minion types to gain power and advantage over different enemy types.

Unlike Overlord, we wanted the player engaging in combat. Minions should feel like additions to the player's combat kit not a requirement.

Section two

Process

The original design vision was to have gameplay be arena based, where you were managing what food enemies went into your central cooking pot.

This gameplay had a lot more "crowd control" elements than combat. It would've had the player be more intentional about what foods they killed.

This was out of scope and didn't fit our game refrences so we shifted early to minion crafting.

This version, which is the one in the game, has the player in a constant loop of pushing enemies back then needing to craft stronger and greater numbers of minions.

First prototype of combat system. Shows basic minions, loot, combos, and dash ability.

I started by creating interfaces for Damageable and Stunnable character. I knew I wanted a modular system so every component and interface would be used for every entity in the game including damageable objects.

In order to do the combos I created two anim notifies which handle damage traces and stepping to next combo animation.

I used this base system to build out additional parts. Using anim notifies made the process smooth and extendable, fitting with our design goals.

Our Mushroom enemy used a projectile spawner attached to its animation and an AOE attack.

For an AOE slam attack, I created a sphere trace that grows over time. It checks hit actors to make sure they are within the bounds of the ring's thickness and height