What is DANTE?
At its core, DANTE is a first-person shooter coupled with a heavy emphasis on movement, through its Bunny Hopping and Grappling mechanics, and playing as fast as possible. The world of DANTE is narratively and mechanically inspired by Dante Alighieri's Inferno and currently features two playable Rings, Limbo and Lust. DANTE takes great inspiration from popular movement-shooters such as Ultrakill, Titanfall, and DOOM.
This project was created with the help of three other developers over the course of three months and utilizes the Unity engine. It is currently playable for both Windows and Mac.
My Contributions
During DANTE's development, I was responsible for overall creative direction, production and managing the team, leading the programming team, designing and creating the movement mechanics and systems, and audio asset mixing and implementation. I also assisted other developers when necessary, created QOL features such as the settings and difficulty menu, and recorded playtests.
General Character Movement
Character movement is an absolutely critical component of DANTE's fundamental design. Early in development, we decided that the controls needed to be tight and snappy while quickly responding to player input. I created the underlying systems that control the general character movement which was accomplished through an acceleration-based model. This model essentially ramps the magnitude of the player's movement vector up and down, to and from a target magnitude allowing for quick acceleration and deceleration.
Bunny-Hopping (AKA B-Hopping)
We felt as if general movement wasn't attractive enough and wanted to supplement this with some kind of skill-based mechanic that was ultimately manifested in the form of Bunny-Hopping (AKA B-Hopping). I created the technical backing for B-Hopping which consisted of increasing the player's speed when they successfully B-Hopped multiple times in a row. Playtest results revealed that players seldom engaged with this mechanic and was remedied by providing an increase in outgoing damage correlated to each successfully chained B-Hop.
Physics-Based Grapple
I created DANTE's Physics-Based Grapple. Early in development, we wanted to give players the ability to traverse the vertical landscape and move beyond the horizontal plane that general movement and B-Hopping adhere to. The Grapple wasn't originally physics-based and would pull players to their desired point and then bounce them in a reflected direction. After player feeedback, I decided to rework the systems responsible for the Grapple into its current iteration.
Creative Direction
DANTE's initial creative foundation was influenced by my own personal affinity for movement-shooters and games that allow players to move quickly. Its' narrative, tone, and mechanics are inspired by my own read-through of Dante Alighieri's Inferno. I pitched DANTE to fellow students during the final capstone course of my undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. I created design documents for various parts of the project in which team members executed with their own artstic flair.
Production
I handled all production related duties that ranged from managing and creating tasks, recording player feedback, running meetings, submitting required material to teaching staff, etc. This was an absolutely great experience as I learned that so much more goes into a product than just the programming, art, or sound. The team made heavy use of Trello for creating, managing, and visualizing tasks related to each sprint and Google Drive and Docs as a centralized space for valuable resources, assets, production related documents, and deployments.
Programming
The programming team consisted of 3 developers, including myself, and was lead under my direction. I oversaw the work of others providing my assistance when necessary and gave creative technical insights when asked. I made certain that other developers were aware of other team members contributions and how they fit within the larger scope of the project. I created the technical backing for various systems such as the settings menu with remappable keybinds, difficulty selection and its effect on various parts in-game, camera FOV effects when using the Grapple, player and enemy health systems, the Revolver's special ability, etc.
Audio Mixing and Implementation
Nearly all audio within DANTE, with the exception of Lust's background track, was sourced, mixed, and implemented by me with the help of FMOD and Freesound. I created looping background tracks for the main menu, Limbo, and when entering the out of bounds area. I created a system that muffles each level's background track when using the Revolver's special ability and when out of bounds.
The final stage of Limbo. A gauntlet encompassing all mehcanics taught.
The mainfestations of Lust charging relentlessly.
A burning wastelend. Time Rings can be seen in the distance.
DANTE reaching great speeds and heights by utilizing the Grapple.
A swirling tornado of fire approaches. Escape its burning wrath.
