Gerrit Pottmeyer

Overview

Riptide is a third-person spaceship combat game where the player arms and takes control of a naval battlecruiser. Created in Unreal Engine 5.3, this game was an interdisciplinary senior capstone project at Champlain College.

A top-down map of Level 1’s original concept layout (top), and a display of each enemy variant (bottom).

As both the only Level Designer and Combat Designer for Riptide, I had to find a creative way to blend combat encounters with a spherical level environment. Initially, I planned out encounters through developing quick digital level sketches from multiple perspectives, and rapidly prototype layouts in-editor. After taking the first prototypes to playtesting, I noticed that players oftentimes got lost, and would leave the level boundary when trying to find objectives. Through adding a central focal point to each level, and spacing encounters around that point, players were able to stay within the level’s spherical boundary.

When designing Riptide’s enemies, I worked closely with Benjamin House-Kelly, our weapon and system designer, Lily McMurtie, our 3D vehicle and weapon artist, and Nicholas Kasprzak, our AI programmer. Initially, the plan was to develop three enemy classes: Corvettes, Cruisers, and Battleships, each one with distinct AI behaviors and three different loadouts of weapons to create unique variants. Each of these ships, following our naval theming inspiration, used specific loadouts reminiscent of real-world configurations; heavy & large weapons positioned near the bow, and lighter weapons at the stern. While we were able to develop all three classes of enemies, as well as all three variants for each enemy, we unfortunately were forced to scrap having unique AI behaviors for each type.

A screenshot of the Distance UI blueprint attached to objectives (above).

As development progressed, play-testers had difficulty locating all enemies within each level. Due to the scale of our environments, and the dim lighting present in space, our UI designer, Jacob Davis, and I were able to create a solution. By developing a UI widget attached to each enemy squadron that displays its current position and distance, players were able to locate and wipe out objectives without confusion.

Postmortem

Riptide was my first large, interdisciplinary, team project. Prior to my senior year, I had only worked in teams of roughly 6 people. Now having collaborated with more than double that number on a single project, I’ve been able to grow my collaboration skills immensely. Starting with 9 developers, the game’s prototype was developed until mid-November of 2023, when a pitch was presented at Champlain College’s production greenlight. Five teams out of ten were selected to move forward at this stage, with one of them thankfully being Riptide. Shortly after being selected, our team onboarded 8 new developers from teams whose games did not pass. During the spring semester, our newly resized team of 17 developers created, tested, and polished a playable demo for PAX-East. The game released on Steam in May, 2024.

Riptide was also the first project I’ve been an Enemy/Combat designer on. While I’ve come a long way in understanding how to design and balance both enemies and encounters since starting this project, I still feel proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish. It’s been an incredible journey getting to this point, and I’m excited to see what I can learn going forward.

Riptide Design Documentation: