Hunters of Hubertus

Hunters of Hubertus is an steampunk-meets-penny-dreadful monster hunting game, combining turn-based tactical combat with interactive fiction and eye catching art. In the game you play as the managing director of Beast & Blood ltd. A licensed company of beast hunters traveling the danger ridden streets of Strago. A industrialized hub of the northern world recently struck by wave of famine, civil unrest and increase in unnatural activity. A perfect place for you and your hunters to grow your business. Player itself is tasked to slay the beasts plaguing the city of Strago along with discovering what lurks in the long shadows of unforgiving polar night.

Work Type: Personal project at Digitalents Helsinki
Status: In Progress
Platform: PC
Engine: Unity (C# and Ink)
Team: Game Director, 3 Programmers, 2 Artist, Scriptwriter, Game Designer

Special mentions: We pitched this game with our teams other designer Miikael Vuorio at Digitalents Helsinki and got chosen to the pre-incubation program.
Checkout our pitch: Youtube

Facebook: Hunters of Hubertus

My Contribution

Game Concept – Gameplay Mechanics and Setting

Game Design – Combat mechanics, Abilities, Gameplay flow

UI Design  – Menu Layouts, Combat UI

UX Design – Gameplay flow, Combat Readability Tweaks

AI Design – Decision Trees for all the Monster AI’s

Combat Tweaking and Balancing

Design comments

Concept

The games idea and background was my idea came from one of my all time favorite games: “Witcher 3”. I absolutely loved the game with only one mild annoyance of the streamlined hunting of monsters in the game. I wanted to feel more like a hunter and made a game concept that would combine challenging turn based combat with the need to study and hunt the monster.

Hook

I have designed the core idea for the game to combine tactical turn-based combat with a need to pay attention to the story. Each monster fight is its own boss fight. Knowing the monster, its behavior and weaknesses gives player much greater chance of succeeding. Player is never given straight answers but things are hinted at and it is up to the player to figure the rest out.

Gameplay

The combat at is core is a basic turn based tactical combat.  Combat is done with stamina based system. Each character has their own amount of stamina to use per turn. Player can play safe and use characters stamina less by doing less action or take a risk of staggering the character by doing more actions per turn. I also designed various behavior models to the enemy AI and plan to implement a reaction based hit system. Attacking and Defending uses slider that defines characters chance to hit and dodge attacks. This way nothing is left to chance. Every mistake is made by the player. It is also designed to courage player to think about the stamina usage by making it easier to hit and dodge if character has high enough stamina. In addition we hope to add items to the game that have different effects on different characters and monsters. Think of giving chocolate to dog versus a person.