Apex X
Apex X - Game Document
Premise
A hybrid of DMC1 and Arcade Beat 'Em Ups with elements of Souls. Explore sprawling zones and complete certain combat-oriented objectives in fundamentally Action Strategy-driven progression with arena-driven boss encounters. Story delivery is primarily handled through player actions and the environment, with dialogue and cinematics at certain breakpoints through the game.
ApexX represents the pinnacle of action game theory. It encompasses a vast and learned understanding of conventional and vintage designs with a deep philosophy of both competitive (PvP) and casual (PvE) gaming, and seeks to blend them together by establishing never before attempted interaction-first methods, hoping to answer the eternal question of "can this be done better?" Trialing the bizarre, the insane and the mundane, the countless inquiries of my LP's and projects dating over twenty years ago are put to the test.
Setting Concept
- Unrevealed Apex precursor story involving Annah, Horseman of War, the formation of Kherrei and the death of the River of Stars. Includes the Iron Emperor, the White and related characters.
- Player controlls Annah and utilizes the mythology of Conquest to defeat supernatural opponents and horrors from beyond the cosmos in psychotic arenas with high emphasis on aesthetic and visual storytelling.
Surface Concept
- Private project, released only to specific individuals.
- Difficulty-driven game concept with emphasis on player skill. Targets high-end DMC players in relative technical skill. High-end Souls players will find the game extremely difficult immediately into the initial tutorial. End project will probably resemble both visually but stand apart from these examples in execution.
- AI-driven combat and world mechanics with aggressive opponents whom utilize all portions of pathable map terrain and adapt to player tendencies.
- Action RPG-styled player interfacing, with the exception that it is built for a Mouse and Keyboard rather a Controller. Controller is not supported.
- Stagger, Knockdown & similar mechanics approached in a more sane way than industry software.
- Keymappings used for attacks and abilities based on my MMO mappings. No or little use of double key combos. Absolutely no double tapping or other stupidity. Remapping supported.
- Utilizes Nanite Occlusion Culling to prevent pop-in typical of default GPU occluders.
- Forcibly disables conventional cancer processes such SSR, Chromatic Aberration, Auto Exposure to eliminate eyestrain typical of modern games.
- Professional grade technical art and audio work typical of my projects.
- Currently utilizing TSR and CAS while tentatively considering AA-less solutions or AMD-driven AA solutions.
Player Concept
Currently heavily volatile in concept.
- Emphasis on precision, potentially including projectile interception and similar reflex-oriented defensive maneuvers as your only means to mitigate or repel damage.
- No lock-on, softlock, or autoaim.
- No i-frames on any abilities, including your dash.
Aesthetic Concept
- Strong influences from Berserk, Dragon's Dogma, DMC1-4 and South Korean MMO's.
- Emphasis on fluidity and concise, impactful moments following traditional Asian visual design.
- Conventional audio design typical of my earlier projects but scaled appropriately to the new environment.
- Starsworn audio library used for music.
- If project reaches foreseeable stages of completion I will consider hiring professional female voice actors. Else, all other roles will be voiced by myself. (I will consider third party submissions if we reach major milestones).
Design Philosophies
Elegance
Above all, the game is intended to appear relatively smooth and fluid, and also play extremely responsively. I look for powerful, striking colors and lighting with an emphasis on fluidity between movements and periods of time orchestrated by the player's exploration. Individual zones are large and sprawling with varied progression paths and ideology governing the player's guidance, often following a tried-and-true "what feels best" instinct that has allowed me to build engaging and well-paced game worlds in Dungeons & Dragons, RPGMaker, Diablo 2 and similar platforms.
This instinct rests upon over fifteen years of critical game casting and technical reflection from some of the most demanding analytical strategies in software, with well over two decades of experience building single player and multiplayer content. In this sense, my philosophy to the overall approach and feel of the way the game looks and sounds is not something that can be grounded in a routine. Each location is unique, each idea stands apart, and each experience builds into a concept I call "Elegance".
From the way the player character handles, including cancellable attacks and movement through Dash/Step, to the freeform movement liberated from archaic lock-on mechanisms, the gameflow travels seamlessly between environmental and unit interactions, as it should be. No effort is made to artificially engineer gimmicks that only interact with specific objects or units, like grappling points, QTE's, gliding, grabs and other pointless bloat. As with all skill-based software, the concept of RNG-governed results intended to reduce player agency, like the random cooldowns in Starcraft 2 or the Critical Strikes in Team Fortress 2, is absent from all attacks and abilities of all units. Instead, the game places the burden of precision and consistency on the player and offers no routes to worming out of playing better. No cooldowns such as Rage of the Titans, no powerups such as Invulnerability or Blue Orbs, and no revive functions exist in this project. You cannot level up your attributes or abilities, only your skill.
The reduction of bloat and grind allows the exploration of content through the concepts of interactive elements rather than distractions, which means the individual expressions of the player and the AI opponents are all the more important. Hundreds of unique enemies await you in the world of Apex, each with distinct behaviors, attack and collision handling, and many with unique approaches to pathing and aggression. Like all developers of game software I recognize the necessity of advanced and highly intelligent computer AI to making a playable product, and AI is at the first and foremost of my research for this project.
The seamless flow of exploration and challenging combat unrestricted by gimmicks and elements that disrupt the gameflow forms a harmonic movement I visualize as the motion of strings. The goal is to provide an experience that allows the tempo of the strings to change and shift, but never become discordant or twisted. At the most glaring and obvious points, this means uninvited annoyances like minigames do not exist, and at the lower levels of gameplay it means that nothing can disrupt the core elements of how the game feels to play, including limiting movesets after they are unlocked, changing the player's movespeed or available functions arbitrarily, or introducing non-interactive mechanics that disrupt the core gameflow, like non-visualized resources or elements that circumvent existing resources. Progression adds to the player's available functions, it does not change existing ones.
Media -