Orthello, Son of Death
Orthello, Son of Death
Lestat Smith
Embedded Files
Stop the evil necromancer from killing your father: The God of Death
Description: You play as Orthello, the prince of the realm of Death, who witnesses his father nearly killed by a powerful necromancer. As Orthello, you must save the world by restoring order to the realm of the living and the realm of the dead by adventuring on earth and uncovering an artifact to stop the necromancers. However, the catch is, every mortal you kill sends their soul to the necromancer, who has become the new god of death, and gives him power.
Purpose: This was my first game project ever. It helped me further skills in Unity and allowed me to discover the magic of game development. I also explored making game systems & environments with paid & free art assets.
Tools Used: Unity, Blender, Photoshop, OBS, Unity Asset Store
Gameplay Clips
Introduction To Game Development
While working full time in the US Army, I started my journey into video game development and instead of starting with Pong or Tetris I really wanted to make a dark fantasy RPG in the style of Fable with elements of World of Warcraft. Without any knowledge of scope or game development in general, I wrote up a story and planned out systems in the game I wanted which included talent trees, RPG classes, class swapping, picking up items, and a spell/combat system. After I was satisfied with my vision, I decided to go with Unity and found some free Unity tutorials on Youtube on how to make an RPG. I followed this with delight and made a character move in a 3D world and kept on going.
Systems Design
My desire to make a game with a RPG class system and talent trees drove my development for Orthello. I drew from my past game and RPG experience and started creating something I was excited for. I used paid UI elements and configured them in a sensible fashion, learning about UI, Unity, and coding along the way.
I also added combat elements to the game as that was part of the main gameplay loop. After creating a basic combat system I tackled an inventory system that remembers items you pick up. I also wanted the ability for the player to pick up items in the real world so I made a mouse over script for 3D objects that allowed you to do so, and the cursor changes when you mouse over them.
Major Systems Completed
The player can attack enemies with his fists or equipped weapons. I coded a system that adds the stats of your equipped items to attacks. Floating damage numbers also relay to the player damage done.
You can hover over items in the environments and right click them to pick them up. I designed an inventory system that sees items, has tooltips, and allows you to equip them.
The equipment screen shows all currently equipped items, tooltips, and allows you to click them to unequip them.
The player can choose from 12 unique classes and can equip them in the class tree screen. I added the ability to hot swap classes and the player gains talent points each level and can invest them into the various talent trees.
Connected to the class system is the classbook, where players can take spells of their equipped classes and add them to their action bar. Abilities are locked for classes that are not equipped currently.
The action bar is connected to the health and mana pools visibly. The action bar can have abilities drag-and-dropped to it and they can be either clicked on with the mouse or the corresponding key can be pressed to activate.
Every 3 levels, Orthello gains the ability to choose a new class to be able to be equipped in the class tree. It randomly picks 3 of the remaining unlearned classes and presents it to the player, while also presenting information about the classes.
I added a radial tooltip system to show the cooldown of abilities and hovering over them displays the time remaining in seconds.
I created a simple experience table for the player and level system that requires experience to pass a threshold. Killing enemies grants experience.
Play The Demo!
Postmortem
First Game: Orthello was a crazy start to my game development journey. I spent many hours teaching myself coding, game design, level design, UI, and systems design. I wanted a game that would interest me and Orthello is quite an interesting game even if it's a white whale. I am happy with the systems and gameplays I designed in a short period and consider it a success in learning, even if I only showed it to a few people. I had great visions and plans for this game and it was so fun to see many of them come to life in this vertical slice.
Asset Store: If it isn't clear by now, I did not model or do art for much of this game. There's nothing wrong with that, but I had no idea how making games worked when I first started and going to the Unity asset store seemed like a way to make my vision come true. I wasn't too worried about art direction and just snagged a ton of varying art pieces that I thought looked nice. I even payed someone on Fiver to model and rig a character for me. All of this taught me process and I would learn in the future more about the game creation pipeline and the appropriate times to use free assets. I am not interested in making asset flip games and am more wary of it now.
A Lesson In Scope: The biggest lesson other than game creation for me was scope. I can see why people suggest Pong or Tetris, they are low scope games that you can complete. Orthello is not a game 1 person could complete in their lifetime alone. Making this vertical slice took months and months and each system wasn't fully complete. I saw the writing on the wall and put away Orthello because of scope and my desire to make other games. I am glad I learned about scope early on and hope one day to join a studio where I can make ambitious games with a team.
Credits
Game & Systems Design - Lestat Smith
Cursor Code - Darkness Blade
UI Icons & Art - PONETI
Orthello Model - Mubashir Hanif
Blacksmith Tools - Kristian De Leon
Wooden Fences - Jaroslav Grafskiy
Medieval House - GameAssetFactory
Campirefire Pack - Dreamdev Studios
Crate - Amanda3D
Torch - Axel Vaude
Horror Axe - ESsplashkid
Stump - zura
Fantasy Monsters - PROTOFACTOR, INC
Tree Models - Aleksey
Chain Model - Stepan Koppel
Get in touch at lestat.e.smith@gmail.com
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse