Soulslike Project

This demo was made as a solo dev project to learn animation and AI behaviour techniques, with the incredible help of a team of Music and Sound Designers to bring the game to life!

• Kris Sian - Game Design, Programming, Level Design, Art, Animation
• Madeline Autumn - Composer
• Yuheng Wang - Sound Effects Artist
• Shanan Mcleary - Sound Effects Artist

The Original Soundtrack by Madeline Autumn can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwn-am84i5O7XXGK7n0GNr34uuUVbylj6

Special thanks to the UC staff at for their supervision, to NZGDC for providing a student games booth to demo the project at an actual conference (!!) and the much-needed help from these tutorials and assets:

• GOAP tutorial by git-amend
• Grass Shader tutorial by Brackeys
• Glitter Shader tutorial by Daniel Ilett
• Unity Animation Rigging Package for generic-rig IK
• Mixamo Animations for the humanoid characters (Melee Axe Pack, Sword and Shield Pack, Action Adventure Pack, and other misc animations)
• Yughues Concrete Materials by Yughues/Nobiax
• Grid Prototype Materials by MLAgent
• Obstacle Course Pack by AisuKaze Studio

Also a huge thank you to the playtesters at UC and NZGDC! I'm sorry I haven't implemented your feedback yet (the game is still very jank!) but I have a ton of notes recorded that will be super helpful! At this point I'm unsure whether I'll upload a substantial update to fix the game's flaws, or try to rebuild the game from scratch with the benefit of experience - in either case it might be a while 😅😅

Known issues that I hope to fix one day (sorry!):

• The demo has no scripted ending - once the boss is defeated nothing happens. I intended to add a new bonfire and trigger credits when interacted with but didn't get it in on time.
• The player's hitboxes are short, and momentum is cancelled when performing an attack. If the stepping animation continued this would have better follow-through and result in fewer missed attacks.
• The player's unarmed attacks do not have hitboxes. Nor does two-handing the shield.
• Throwing daggers often collide with the player, causing a flinch animation but inflicting almost zero damage. They don't damage enemies, making them useless in this build.
• Enemy AI clears its memory too often and will forget the player immediately. Enemies also don't turn to face the player, and can sometimes clip you with their attack colliders from behind.
• Boss AI doesn't wait for one attack to complete before launching another - allowing fireballs, fire breath, summoning the AOE attack, and various swipes to play simultaneously, even while moving.
• The Boss' hitboxes are slightly out of sync with the model. Many of its attacks can miss completely, or seemingly hit without warning.
• Occasionally the AI across the entire level can break, resulting in enemies laying flat on the ground (as if they fell from a lethal height) or having no movement behaviour at all. This mostly happens when resting at a bonfire.
• Resting at a bonfire doesn't restore the player's healing gourd supply, but dying does.
• There are no i-frames while opening doors, interacting with bonfires, etc
• The crypt shortcut interactable blends into the environment
• The crypt shortcut doesn't persist between deaths
• Sometimes UI elements won't disable on death and get stuck on-screen
• The poison meter has no icon
• The run animation still plays underneath the attack animations, resulting in footstep sounds if you keep holding a direction while performing another action.
• Many actions can overlap when they shouldn't. For instance, healing while rolling.
• Lock-on doesn't automatically disable when an enemy dies, and cannot be retargeted without manually toggling it off and turning the camera (and player iirc) to face the intended target.
• The level overall is too long, dark, and difficult to navigate. The dropdown into the crypt is especially dark and requires the player to land on at least one of the platforms midway down before continuing, or else they will experience a lethal fall.
• Item pickup, inventory, and parrying are all broken and are currently disabled. IK is mostly absent from this build, although the Boss bite and tail-spear attacks both use a broken IK implementation that can look jank. Poise, staggering, stance breaking, knockdown/getting up, and critical attacks/backstab animations are all disabled as well - sadly I didn't find time to integrate them with the proper enemies after the first milestone demo.

Any feedback is of course welcome!