Reflecting on Lobber
LOBBER is my biggest project to date and definitely the one I had the most fun with. It was a collaboration between me and 5 of my friends at Fitchburg State University for our 4 month Game Studio Capstone program, taking place of an internship. It's a 3D top down hack and slash/brawler made in Unity where you play as a goblin/orc (gorc?) fighting endless waves of skeletons with a diverse moveset inspired by character action games (Bayonetta, Devil May Cry).
It was conceptualized by our friend Mike West, originally wanting to make a Diablo-ish top down combat game with 3 worlds and an overarching story. Once the pitch was approved amongst our classmates, we formed our team and our director Ryan scoped the game down to an arcade game with an emphasis on the combat system, since we felt that's what we could do best given the timeframe.
I was one of two main programmers on this project, the other being Mike Roskuski. I primarily handled anything player controller related while Mike R handled enemy AI. I prototyped and developed the player movement and combat systems. I got basic movement and attacking working, then tied those to the player animations Mike W made, and attached damage/hitboxes/gameplay data to each animation using a state machine Mike R developed the backbone of, I maintained, and Ryan later did a final polish pass on all the animations to make them feel great. The player can use a 3-hit combo and a slower chop attack to one-hit KO enemies, then they can collect skeletons' skulls to build up meter and fling their heads off the axe. There's also a super button that can be held when doing an attack to perform more advanced moves using more meter.
As development carried on, I started working on some more advanced smaller systems, including:
- A smart targeting system using a cylinder attached to the player that points in the direction of the control stick, and homes projectiles in on the nearest target in the direction the player is facing using some raycast math
- My first save and load system, keeping track of tutorial progress and general statistics (longest run, # of certain enemies killed, heads caught, etc)
- Working with Ryan on a UI system to best portray player stats, moveset inputs, and combo count
Throughout development, we'd playtest regularly, whether that's our team, our fellow friends and colleagues working on the other two games from our Capstone class, other students from the Advanced Games Workshop class that semester, or industry professionals like Graeme Timmins, who's currently working on Borderlands 4 but met with us a few times throughout development to provide gameplay suggestions and feedback.
Halfway through Capstone, we showed the game off at Made in MA 2023, an event hosted by MassDIGI a block down from PAX East geared towards local students and smaller teams showing off their games. It was a great time showing off an in development version of the game in a public setting like that, and we took some feedback from players at the event into account (mostly tutorialization stuff) when we came back and wrapped up development in our month left in Capstone.
As Capstone ended in May, we wrapped everything up by doing a big post mortem with the whole team in the Antonucci Science Complex presentation hall at Fitchburg State. It was livestreamed online and we had an in-person attendance of ~50.
At the end of that presentation we promised we'd release on Steam, and after a big 5 month polish phase over the summer (mostly tying up loose ends, making sure the game runs fine on Steam Deck while I added a graphics settings menu to compensate), we finally launched the Steam version on Lobber day (er, labor day) in September 2023. Shortly afterwards I hosted another postmortem online through Boston Post Mortem with Ryan and Anthony Gatturna, our environment artist and level designer.
All in all, at risk of being hyperbolic, I'd say my experience working on the game was life changing. Despite the short dev cycle, I haven't worked on a project this big before with a team of talented individuals like this. It was a massive confidence boost to have the time to flesh out a decent combat system and craft a solid moveset that feels good up close and from a distance, and I'm very happy with all of our contributions to the project to make our most polished game to date.
As for what's next? Well, in the two years since the game's release, I've mostly been prioritizing honing my IT skillset to move up the corporate latter, but me making this website and writing this blog makes me want to go back to the days of making a small goofy project with a handful of people I know and love. Most of my friends from Capstone are in the middle of making bigger projects right now (like Ryan, who is currently leading a team to work on a bigger version of his multiplayer game TowerTanks), so expect to see some solo jam stuff from me in the near future. In the meantime, as of me publishing this post, Lobber is now free on Steam (go play it!!!) and the code is avaliable on GitHub (and linked to several times throughout this piece) if you want to give it a look. Looking forward to sharing something new soon!