The Ethereal Trial is a party game for 2-4 players in which a strange sentient machine lures warriors in with a trial that grants the victor any wish they desire. There are three paths to victory, as unique characters battle it out in this multiplayer top down pixel art fantasy arena brawler.
The game has an accompanied an art book that details the background to the games setting as well as its characters.
Hit your opponents or the machine. KOed players lose their golden orb and drop purple orbs that can be picked up and thrown at the machine to supply it.
There are 3 randomly generated environments to battle in:
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The Dungeon that has levers that drop bombs.
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The Ice Arena where players can activate a snow storm that covers the field with snow and freezes the water.
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The Volcanic Lair that has damaging pillars of fire that drop large boulders across the battlefield.
In this initial release you can play as Shiba-chan, who wields a giant hammer and has some electrical magic ability.
Ethereal Trial SFX Reel
For this project I took a leadership role, putting together a small team of students across multiple disciplines including a programmer, a graphic designer and a couple of audio students.
On top of managing the team from concept to final product, as a design major I was the lead game designer for the project. During the first half of development I designed everything from the gameplay loop, core mechanics, characters movesets, items and stage mechanics. I also worked with the graphic designer as she gave story and context to the setting and gameplay elements I had designed, which was expressed in her artbook she did for the game.
Initially, the only programming tasks I was allocated were all the stage related coding including level design, hazards and switches. As part of this I set myself the goal of coding in procedural generation instead of a collection of static level designs. I was successful in achieving this outcome and the result is three different battlefield types that each have their own set of criteria and hazards that randomly generate, with the correct border sprites also being chosen based on neighbouring tiles. The code allows for the key attributes to be edited in the inspector, such as the range of frequency and size of the wall and water/lava pits that appear or the number of hazards and switches that are placed. Some of these attributes can also be changed based on the battlefield type, for example the Ice Arena tends to have less walls and larger water segments so as to better take advantage of the ice mechanics.
However, due to the lead programmer being absent from the project due to personal reasons for about a third of development, the game was rescoped and scaled down a lot. As a result many more programing tasks were undertaken by myself. These included the coding of the controls and core gameplay mechanics such as hit detections and character movement. As part of this I learned and implemented Unity’s new Input Systems which allowed for easy set up of multiple players and different control methods. Some other programming tasks that I completed were the playable character’s moveset and attributes, setting up animators for the character, items and stage components and implementing the sound effects in the game.
You can download and play The Ethereal Trial from my
