LILITH Devlog #1

Hi, welcome to my first DevLog. I'm Kevin, solo developer of Lilith. This game is a 2.5D arena hack and slash developed for a course assignment. The brief on this project was to develop a game from the Beat-Em-Up genre and as every following week a new iteration of the build will be updated, playtested by players, and with the feedback it received, a new version will be made for the following week.

During this project, it was advised to focus on design and to use whatever tools and engine to work efficiently without the stress of programming and art. But for me, since I've already familiarized myself with Stencyl from my previous works Rogue and StrikeDown, using Unreal Engine through this can be a big help for my upcoming Final Year Project.

Ideation Process :

Despite being a passion project for me to improve on my programming skills, this game is still fundamentally a design oriented project. So most of my art inspirations/resource came from the itch io free assets tab and for the mechanics it came from doomscrolling YouTube. As I was going through the list of tutorials and devlogs, a video from CobraCode came up on my recommendations and as a huge Metroidvania fan, this 2.5D genre was an instant yes for me.

Building the Foundation :

CobraCode was a huge inspiration for the aesthetic of the game, but the main mechanic of the game came from a character sprite that had heavy and light sprite attacks, and with luck I found this video from LeafBranchGames creating a 2D combo system in Unreal's PaperZD system, and I guess down the rabbit hole I go.

Down the rabbit hole :

It's an endless pit. Thought I aim to only finish up the basics need for the first iteration of the game, it felt like the next few iterations of the game will only get tedious as time goes on. But thankfully tutorials and references are easy to find online, so I had a decently easy time scrambling pieces together for the first few iterations of the game. Most of the issues I faced were mostly sprite issues and lighting clashes (Also me spending like 50% of my time understandable and editing UE5 Materials and boy I do not wanna talk about that...)

(Early builds having blurry sprite issues)

(Basic combo test)


(I love bugs <3)

Polishing + Self Reflect :

Once I got the hang at the basics, I think polishing the build was fairly straight forward, fix up the minor animation bugs, set up an arena level, atmospheric details, and get a basic enemy AI running.

And there we go, the first build is now complete. Most feedbacks that I've gotten from the playtesters are the player's movement feeling too still/unresponsive along with the difficulty of the game being pretty boring. But so far I spend most of my time getting grasp of the basics of Unreal Engine along with its PaperZD plugin, further polishing will take a longer time and so I will first focus on making the player's movement and gameplay "feeling good". And looking towards potential future builds, I would like to make up more variety of enemies and a difficulty scaling system. But for now, thank you for reading my first DevLog for Lilith. Hope you look forward to my future builds.