Damocles

A 3D action-packed hack-and-slash dungeon crawler full of dodge rolls and hordes of skeletons. Can you escape the dungeon even while a cursed sword saps your life?

About the project

Damocles was made in about four weeks for a prototyping class. In this game, you play as a dungeon adventurer who takes up a cursed sword and must use it to battle the skeletons blocking their escape from the dungeon – unless the sword itself kills the player first.

I was an artist on this team of five; my teammates were Alex Koeberl, Oliver Creighton, Tommy Roberts, and Mitchell Young (the other artist). On this project, I was mainly in charge of the playable character design, modeling, and animation. I also created some vfx like the fireball as well as some environment art.

Character Model

Before modeling the player character, I drew the design in Photoshop. I came up with a few different silhouettes and asked my teammates for feedback – the design we decided on is pictured below.

My thinking for this design was that the character should have minimal armor, so as to support quick movement and dodge-rolling, while still looking like an equipped adventurer. I also wanted to keep the design as androgynous as possible, so I used armor references from both male and female characters. Additionally, no skin or hair is shown so that players can imagine their character looking like themselves.

Character Animations

This was my first time ever animating 3D objects, so it took some trial and error. The walk cycle was the first animation I made in this project, and it taught me a lot about how to manipulate and pose rigs in blender as well as how to control different actions using the dope sheet.

One animation that was particularly difficult to make was the dodge-roll, pictured above-center. This pose was difficult to find references for, so positioning the limbs in a way that looked natural took a lot of trial and error.