DECIDIT | Rookie Awards 2024

Decidit is a fast FPS roguelike in which you have to go down the revisited hell circles through defeating the demon hordes guarding it.

In order to succeed you will have to be fast, precise but also strategic using all the demonic weapons and abilities collected on the way to create powerful synergies.

Decidit is both a roguelike and a fast FPS, usually two different game genres.

Roguelike means the game will push you to face great difficulty and die over and over in a game that constantly changes. The levels, weapons and abilities are randomly generated making each run unique and a real challenge in itself but also allowing great replayability. The player will have to learn the game mechanics and adopt the best strategy to get through the levels.

Fast FPS is a niche genre using all the traditional aspect of first person shooters (FPS) but speeding up the pace considerably. The game becomes harder when it comes to the aiming aspect but allows the player to explore crazy movement abilities like wall glide or jump rebounds for instance.

In Decidit you’ll be able to overtake the power of the demons you defeat through your journey allowing you to upgrade either your right handgun altering it’s shooting property or your left arm granting you various spells. When you have unlocked an upgrade for both you’ll access a unique synergy using both demonic powers to create devastating combos.

Do you think you have the guts to conquish Dante’s hells ? Try to beat Gluttony's floor (our current game demo) and survive its putrid swamp and deadly creatures.

Play the demo here : https://artmichel.itch.io/decidit

The world of Decidit is deeply inspired by the different floors of Hell as described in Dante’s famous narrative poem “Divine Comedy”. This playable demo focuses on the Circle of Gluttony. We developped a demonic subterranean world around this idea of a place that represents Gluttony and Hell.

Our main inspirations for Decidit's art direction comes from Gieger’s artworks and the game he later inspired, "Scorn". We also took inspiration from the Doom franchise, Akira, Magic The Gathering's recent extensions and more.

We aimed for a semi-realistic art direction with bio-mechanical details on some designs of the creatures and environment.

In order to incorporate Gluttony in our game slice we created three visual identities named and inspired from three French poems. Each of them is represented by a visual characteristic (such as bones, craters and putrefaction), a colour theme and a symbol.

These visual identities are integrated into the UI, the power altars, the guns and modified arms and the creatures.

The idea behind the design of each weapon and arm was to provide a new look with each upgrade and to combine it with one of the French poems.

Weapons

The Sizain Mk.1 is the only weapon available to the player at the start of the game. It is a large revolver that fires six bullets and reloads quickly.

The Sizain Fugue d'Aragon is based on a poem by Louis d'Aragon called "Fugues". It says that ''joy is divided into three'', so the gun has 3 muzzles. Furthermore, the word "fugue" also means "to escape" and we translated this idea into the design with a purple trail.

The Sizain Cimetière d'Eylau is based on Victor Hugo's poem "Cimetière d'Eylau", which means "Eylau’s graveyard". That is why this upgrade takes the shape of grey bones and a ribcage. This weapon can fire either several spiky bones as an SMG or as a powerful shotgun.

The Sizain Muse Malade is based on Charles Baudelaire's poem "La muse malade" ("The Sick Muse"). It was designed to look putrid and pestiferous with a greenish, gastric hue that suggests disease. This weapon shoots projectiles that explode like a grenade launcher.

Spells

The player will also be able to upgrade their left arm during the game. This new arm can throw spells that combine with the upgraded gun to create a powerful synergy.

Fugue d'Aragon: Purple and covered with craters, this new arm unlocks a dash spell that leaves a purple mist behind the player.

Cimetière d'Eylau: With large bones and veins, this arm can create a dome that slows the ennemies passing through and increases the player's movement speed.

Muse Malade: Green and putrefied, this arm throws a projectile that behaves like a rocket. The explosion injures and pushes away the targets.

The creatures were designed to complement each other both visually and mechanically in order to offer a real diversity and complexity in the gameplay. Each of them represent a different threat and is designed as such. We also thought about visibility and went for lighter tones for the monsters by giving them a white skin in order to make them stand out against the darker tones of the environment.

Shrednoss

A powerful and imposing creature designed to charge the player and slice them apart if they get close enough. Inspired by the morphology of an American football player with a large torso and muscular back, deltoids and arms. Its slightly tilted forward posture is also derived from runners and his modified arched legs from fast animals such as cheetahs.

Voras

A sneakier creature closer to a watchdog that evolves in packs and tries to circle the player. It's a lesser threat but a tricky one since he’s able to ambush you and cut your path.

Voris

Voras’s cousin, it behaves differently as it patrols the airs but is just as tricky and has two different patterns ; it will either plunge on the player like a bird of prey and smash them or it will shoot corrosive bile in different patterns while remaining up in the air. We used Vora's mesh, textures and rig to save time during production, it was a way for us to create two different enemies in a shorter period of time.

Menas

A demonic mole that roams the walls, digging with its huge clawed arms and surprising the player when it emerges out screaming and beaming them to death with acids. He was meant to be an occasional but great threat if the player ignored or didn’t pay enough attention to its presence. Unfortunately for schedule reasons and knowing that it was a really technical creature to implement we cut it out during production.

The game takes place in Dante's Underworld and more precisely inside the Circle of Gluttony. We imagined this place to be a subterranean temple with a specific architecture and organic parts.

Due to the limited time we had, we decided to build the environments with the same modular assets and add a different shade in the lighting to convey a feeling of going deeper and deeper into the underworld.

Each "zone" has subtle differences : The first one is covered in mold and has a green tone. The second is a putrid swamp that gives the feeling of being in a stomack. The last zone is covered in organs and flesh and has a dense red atmosphere.

We used simple blockouts to build the level design and do gameplay testing. We then created modular kits of pillars, stairs and platforms to cover the rooms efficiently. We also used Unity's vertex painting tool to dress the room with detailed floors and walls. To add more movement, our technical artist created a vertex displacement shader to make the flesh pulsate and look alive.

At first, we wanted to have 3 different zones in our demo : the sewers (green), the cavern (yellow) and the den (red). But due to time constraints we went for a different approach. You can see the concepts for these different zones below.

The architecture of the rooms represents the circle of gluttony with organic and bony shapes, intestines and teeth. This structure is gradually covered with rotting flesh, representing Gluttony's corruption, which becomes more and more present as the player progresses in the underworld.

Our main goals with the VFX were to make the spells feel really satisfying and powerful to use while keeping them really readable. Because our game's rhythm is very fast, the visual feedbacks should be easy to understand and souldn’t confuse the player.

With this feeling in mind, we tried our best to use VFX to add to the game's juiciness, while fitting the art direction and visual identities of the demonic powers.

The UI was a challenge in itself as we went quite far out of our way to incorporate a modern design philosophy and rework aspects that are usually forgotten in UI design, especially in the FPS genre.

Focusing on the readability and UX, we worked a lot on the foveal zone in the center of the screen in order to avoid the usual trouble for the player having to look sideways to get crucial feedbacks while playing. We designed the spell cooldown, bullet amount and crosshair in order to diplay the information in the center of attention, while remaining not too overhelming.

As for the rest of the UI it was either meant to fit the art direction and blend into the background colours like the lifebars or to stand out when it came to the menus and buttons.

We had the intention to express our chosen art direction through every artistic part of the game including the UI. The life bars have colours that change with the atmosphere of the room the player is in. The bony and sometimes organic aspect of the place also shows in the various frames and icons.

DUPEROIR Mathéo: Texturing, Lighting, Level art
Itch.io | Artstation | LinkedIn

LE-MAO Charlélie: Weapon Design, Weapon Animation, VFX
Itch.io | Artstation | LinkedIn

JORAND Raphaël: VFX, Tech Art, Creature Animation, Level Design
Itch.io | Artstation | LinkedIn

MISTROT--DAUZERES Loïs: Environment concept, Environment modeling, Level Art, Level Design, UI
Itch.io | Artstation | LinkedIn

PERRAUDIN Gaëtan: Lead Artist, Creature Design, Creature modeling, Level Design, Level art, UI
Itch.io | Artstation | LinkedIn

MICHEL Art: Lead Game Designer, Lead Programmer, UX, Tech Art, Game Balancing, VFX, UI
Itch.io | LinkedIn

CHAPERON Lucas: Lead Sound Designer, Level Design
Itch.io | LinkedIn

MOUEZA Jeantony: AI Programming, Game Balancing

ROSCA Antonio: Level Design
Itch.io | LinkedIn

Trailer by obeeztiger and CHAPERON Lucas.
Sound design by CHAPERON Lucas and BOISSELET Alexis

Thanks to the e-artsup Bordeaux teaching team who supervised this project, which was carried out during our 3rd and final year at school.