Legend of Abhimanyu (abbreviated as LoA) is an action-adventure game being developed by ACY Entertainment for iOS devices. We are going to take a small peek into how our development team helped designers implement “Vyuhas” in levels.

Vyuhas are complex soldier formations used in battle, each one with a specific purpose. Some are offensive, defensive, or a combination of the two; while others are focused on mitigating opponent’s mobility and flanking options.

In LoA, each boss character has a distinct approach to battle which causes them to favour a Vyuha. This allows for variation in gameplay as the player needs to approach each Vyuha differently. For example, Wheel formation (bottom left corner) is a purely defensive formation with Dushasana, a boss character in the game, protected from all sides. Abhimanyu must break off each arm one by one before he can take on Dushasana.

From the above pic, it’s evident that placing each soldier manually is a tedious job. Especially when it comes to creating the rest of the level. Fortunately for our level designers, developers created a very handy script that simplified Vyuha creation immensely.

We use Unity game engine and one great feature that it provides is the ability to customize the IDE using editor scripts. The magic here is – “CurveObjectGenerator”, a simple script that uses Bezier curves to place objects, soldiers in this case, in any desired formation. As a level designer, this is great. All those notebook sketches for enemy formations and Vyuhas are translated as it is into level design. It’s same as working with the Pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.

The script allows us to specify the desired formation using a set of points (denoted by green squares). Each point has two handles (blue/yellow circles) which let us control the shape of the formation. We can even create complex shapes effortlessly using this script.

Look at the picture below, the outer wall of combat arena is created using only four points. The prefab for the formation unit needs to be provided in “Instance Object” field. Once the shape is finalized, we can use “Generate” button to place copies of the formation unit alongside it. There are plenty of options to fine tune the distance between units, their orientation, scale variation, etc.

Legend of Abhimanyu comes out this March for iOS devices. Make sure to visit our forum and also give us a shout at @LOAGamee to let us know what you think about the game. Check out our YouTube channel to see all the gameplay videos and latest trailers.

The above article is conceptualized and written by Priyank Singh. He is currently working as Gamer Designer with ACY Entertainment. Priyank played an important role in Gameplay Balancing and Level Designing for Legend of Abhimanyu. 

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