UMBRA ILLUM
Collaborators: Carsten Booth, Tom Kun, Adriana Matic
Tools Used: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
Role : Asset Creator, Designer
Time : 4 Days | March 2019
A tabletop demake of Dark Souls focusing on combat
Challenge
A semesterly program wide design challenge at Sheridan College where students design a game in 4 days. For Winter 2019, Ubisoft Toronto revealed a challenge where we had to make tabletop version of popular video games (Dark Souls).
Design Goals
Exploration: evoking the same feeling of exploring the world and sense of discovery
Progression: allowing the players to learn from their mistakes without it being too difficult that its unnecessarily challenging
Combat: facilitating different play styles while recreating the swift combat system
Rediscovering The World
Demaking a popular video game such as Dark Souls has many challenges. Recreating core pillars such as exploration and the sense of discovery was one of them. In order to successfully emulate the experience of the world, research is vital.
Research of Dark Souls and Ideation
After playing and taking notes of the gameplay, we went through many iterations. Our first iteration was creating a card game with a grid based board. Players placed their cards (which includes weapons, enemies and lore) face down after shuffling them and decide which to uncover in order to proceed to the boss.
First prototype iteration using a grid based board
The grid based board was supposed to emulate the physical aspect of exploration from the game. Unfortunately, this used too much chance and did not have enough opportunity for players to develop a strategy when uncovering the cards.
Learning from Failure
After several unsuccessful iterations, we finally decided to convey each core pillar using a variety of card decks and eliminate the grid based board.
The exploration deck allows players to discover environment and enemies while finding loot. Finding loot in the exploration deck allows players to cater another core pillar we wanted to convey: progression. Allowing players to equip different gear creates an opportunity to adjust their play styles when encountering an enemy and learning from failure if they are defeated. Especially, when it came to the combat system.
Prototype of player's character card and boss character card
Swift Like A Dance
The combat system was a meticulous process from the balancing to capturing the tension of Dark Souls 1v1 combat. Using and Slay The Spire as an influence, we really wanted to have mechanics that enables players to anticipate their enemy's moves and having the ability to retaliate. In order to emulate the combat system, we created two combat decks specifically for enemies and players. Many of our unsuccessful iterations was due to the order of how the decks interact with each other. In the end, the combat allowed anticipation and retaliation for the player rather than it being chance.
Takeaways
Umbra Illum allowed me to learn how to deconstruct a game and try to evoke the same emotions that was originally intended. This process was extremely challenging because we had to translate Dark Souls in a physical game and keep the single player aspect. It’s already difficult to recreate a game with the same mechanics, let alone in a physical game. Ideating for this challenge allowed me to look more into the user experience.
