Explore dungeons with up to four players as you fight hordes of enemies and defeat the darkness corrupting the Sleepy Gardens, a world that exists within the children’s imagination.
Beyond Imagination was created as a senior university project over the course of one semester. A team of 12 people worked together to put the project together. It was awarded “Best Technology Demonstration” from our NJIT Capstone (Spring 2019). It was also awarded “Best 3D Game” from the NJIT Game Expo (2019).
Credits
Satchel Quinn — Game Director, Programmer, Marketing
Jimmy Benites — Lead Environment Artist, Project Manager
Joshua Weinberg — Narrative Designer, Music, Marketing
Nicholas Seccondro — Animator, Character Designer, Concept Art
William Martone — Concept Art
Michael Mejia — Character Designer, Material Designer
Julian Quinn — VFX Artist
Jelani Haynes-Prescott — Design Architect
Reginald Williams — Ability Designer
Ethan Lupinski — Gameplay Concept Artist
Matthew Kataryniak — Procedural Generation Programmer
Ankit Mittal — Secret Feature Developer
Beyond Imagination uses a unique “behavioral progression” system. The progression system monitors a player’s metrics throughout game play and procedurally upgrades the player’s ability that would benefit their play style. To learn more about this system, check out Beyond Imagination’s behavioral progression tree.
The dungeons are procedurally generated through a tiling method. Each “room tile” is represented by a blueprint asset. The tiles are then connected to each other with a generator using the transform of a custom door component.
My position on the team was a gameplay concept artist. I initially began by designing traps and passive item abilities, but given time restraints, the scope of the project had to be readjusted. My work ended up focusing more toward UI design once the scope was readjusted.
The for player’s stats bar, I decided that I wanted to compress it as much as possible. From my personal experience, I found that multi-player games with long stat bars would often get the players confused. They would start mixing up their stat bars with their peer’s. We also weren’t planning on doing a split-screen visual, so having a more compressed stats bar would be more ideal. So I decided to create a “stats circle.” For the innermost part of the circle, the player’s imagination stat (mana, energy, etc.) is displayed. The middle ring is the player’s health bar. I made the ring thicker so that it would be easier for the player to keep track of their health during combat. The outer ring is the player’s EXP. The EXP ring is the thinnest because it should be the least important thing that catches a player’s eye while in combat. The player has three separate types of combat abilities that can be equipped at a time. However, there needed to be a visual cue so the player would know when they had a certain ability equipped. To stick to the theme of a child’s imagination, I decided to use colored marbles to indicate which ability type is currently equipped. On the left side, I included the variations of the stats bar and a gameplay screenshot of the stats bar in use.
As a last minute detail, the game director requested me to create a loading screen icon. He gave me creative freedom to do whatever I liked, so I decided to draw a silhouette of one of the character models. Running toward adventure, perhaps?
To draw the frames, I found a video of a person running and loaded the video into Photoshop to pick out the key frames in the running cycle. Then I used those key frames for reference while I drew each frame. I then used GlueIT to generate a sprite sheet. Then a shader was used in Unreal to create an animated material that would be used during loading screens.