Scapegoat

You play as the young goat devil Baphomet when one day your island is invaded by a cult of holy birds. As a last resort, Baphomet enters a contract with a demonic sword to aid in their endeavour. The demon sword, The Bloodletter of Hell, offers its power in return for Baphomet’s own life force for each swing of the sword. 

For each enemy hit, the sword gains Bloodletting, which can be consumed to unleash powerful abilities or heal Baphomet to continue their slaughter.

Collect blood from slain enemies and make offerings at the ritual site to upgrade either the damage of the sword or Baphomet’s survivability. 

Can you balance offense and defence in this third person hack ’n’ slash adventure? 

Developed in four weeks during our second game project at Futuregames with the theme of Growth and Fragility. We chose to implement this theme in the combat system, highlighting the Growth of the sword versus the Fragility of Baphomet.

The process for coming up with the game idea started with a brainstorming session where each team member wrote down keywords relating to game concepts. We then sorted these into categories and discussed the most prominent or thought-provoking ones. This was followed by each team member writing down a game concept based on one or more of these categories. The most common setting, mechanics and gameplay was then extracted and turned into it’s on own concept which ended up being the final concept for the game.

In the beginning of development, we set out to create a narrative driven game with slower and deliberate combat. After feedback we lessened our focus on narrative and significantly increased the pace and intensity of the combat, multiplying the number of enemies fought simultaneously and emphasizing the impact and game feel of each swing.

Key takeaway 

Rapidly prototyping without art assets as we inadvertently locked ourselves into designs by having already made assets for elements of the game that needed iteration.

Credits

Animation and VFX  Barry Chen David Hult Sushil Jangra  Eric Persson  

Artists Zyrile Mae Martens  Finn Mazur Carl Trybom

Design  John Geir Andersson  Leon Cederberg Karl Kasper Enwall Alexander Granskog Jennafer Mikkonen

Programmers Jesper Elmtoft  Ossian Däckfors  Albin Johansson  Tim-Eliza White