Protodroid DeLTA: Developing a 3D Action Platformer Set in a Solarpunk World

Introduction

Hi! I’m Adam Kareem, the Creator and Lead Developer of Protodroid DeLTA, a 3D action-platformer set in a Solarpunk world and inspired by the SNES classic Mega Man X. I’ve actually never worked anywhere in games. I started as a hobbyist/part-timer and where I work as a Mechanical Engineer by day, and tinker away at games by night. I used to work at Whirlpool designing home appliances, and now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area working in Tech.

All my previous projects have been fan games. That’s where I got my start, with a focus on re-envisioning classic games from my childhood like Sonic, Mega Man, and Ape Escape to modernize their gameplay and mechanics.

Source of Motivation

A friend of mine at my last job opened my mind when told me about publicly available game engines. I thought to make games I had to work at like Square or Ubisoft or Nintendo or have a CS degree. Unreal Engine and Unity are incredibly popular and both free to start with. So I dove into Unreal Engine because of its Blueprints system. Not knowing how to write C++ or C# at the time, it was amazing seeing that I could circumvent all that and get to the process of making games from the jump by using Blueprints. I still use them exclusively to this day. Protodroid DeLTA is a 99% BP project.

For motivation, it was this belief that I could figure out how to make Sonic the Hedgehog feel fun and control well in 3D space. I love Sonic, as most everyone does, but always felt that in 3D games he never controlled well at high speeds. Where, when zooming super fast, the slightest tilt left or right and he’d go slamming into the rails. And the very linear level design where you could just hold up or hold boost to win just felt a lot to be desired for me. So I set out to solve that design problem and create satisfying gameplay.

The Idea Behind Protodroid DeLTA 

I’ve always been motivated by the pursuit of solving problems – mostly design and gameplay oriented – which is what inspired me to take a look at another beloved game, Mega Man X, and ask, “How can I modernize this?” I saw the core problem being, “How can I translate the fast and fluid gameplay of Mega Man X into 3D? And that fan game is what became Protodroid DeLTA.

Choosing the Genre 

It’s always been my favorite genre. I hear that platformers rarely fare well commercially and that Steam is flooded with them (2D ones, specifically). But since my roots were always in hobbying, I just made games based on games I personally loved and were due for a revival or reinvention. 

Plus, there’s just something so pure about a platformer. It’s something you just pick up and play. No inventories, missions, or side quests are needed to remember where you were the last time you played or where you were headed. Just a pure focus on gameplay with a super low barrier to entry: choose a level; get to the end of that level. And I love that. Especially now as a dad with 2 small kids, it can be tough finding time to game. But with platformers, you get into the action quickly and even 15 minutes feel great.

Gameplay Mechanics

The main gameplay mechanics are the auto-lock-on feature and the DeLTA’s movement. In fact, they were both amongst the first things implemented because I knew I would need to design the entire game around them. And fortunately, they landed really well with players. The most consistent feedback I get is, “The dash feels amazing” and “With the lock on, I can just focus on platforming” – which were my goals all along. 

So, for the dash, the important thing there was to ensure that it covered sufficient distance to feel worth it, let players change direction through it and it not be a dodge roll to grant i-frames. The one big challenge was the dash was maybe a bit OP. That was some of the first advice my friend who is a Game Designer said to me too. “You might want to tone down the dash. It’s too strong.” And he was right because it led to levels needing to be longer, and made avoiding enemy encounters too easy. But, it makes the moment-to-moment gameplay feel really good. So I opted to keep the original design. 

And that latter point about i-frames. It’s key because I really want players’ movements to be deliberate and to feel rewarded for being so. It’s so common now for dodge rolls to grant i-frames, which I feel lends itself too much to repetitive inputs as a player. I wanted to lean more into the deliberate movement that the Mega Man series is known for.

Now for the auto-lock feature. I knew that with all the platforming and simultaneous combat going on that the game would simply fall apart if players had to aim with the right thumb stick. The barrier to entry for players would be way too high. And it would take the game far away from its pick-up-and-play nature, like the Mega Man games it was inspired by. I designed an auto-lock feature to allow players to keep their primary focus on movement and play the game with just the controller's face buttons. But what I saw in early play testing was players had no idea what the bounds of the lock-on range were. 

They thought the game was just targeting the nearest enemies, whereas I designed it to project straight out from wherever the camera was currently facing. So the solution here was to expand the tutorial a bit to clearly visualize “this is the lock-on range!” And once that was in, I got way fewer questions and feedback about how the lock-on worked.

Level Development

This came from a lot of play-testing. Externally, by virtue of the Kickstarter, I was able to share an alpha build with about 100 backers. And a number of them sent recorded playthroughs and from that I gleaned a lot about which systems or designs were and weren’t working. One of the main learnings from that led to the hard and soft checkpointing system. Players were reporting that the levels felt long, or that, if they failed a platforming challenge, their progress was reset way too far. And it felt defeating as opposed to encouraging. So we added more soft checkpoints (places to be reset to when falling into a pit) and hard checkpoints (places to resume your progress from if you leave a level).

Internally, at the development’s peak, I had 4 Level Designers working on the game’s levels. And every Friday we had Playtest Fridays where the designers as well as our 5 Level Artists would play each level and give feedback. Then, as we prepped for the Beta release, we held an internal Play and Grade where the team would play and rate each level. And this worked really well because the team had players of varying skill levels and helped us find pain points. 

Art Direction

I knew I needed the game world to stand out and felt that generic sci-fi futuristic was just so overdone. I wanted the game to feel hopeful and uplifting, and it’s so common in games to find gritty, dark, neon-lit cyberpunk-inspired settings. So poking around on Pinterest, I found this incredible piece by Stephen Wong that he submitted for the Atomhawk Solarpunk contest. And I immediately fell and love. From there, it was a matter of finding as much Solarpunk inspired artwork and settings as possible to help me flesh out this world and its design principles.

The main pillars for the art direction were pretty straightforward: take stylized futuristic buildings add a lot of nature to it. Trees, water, rocks, mountains, vines, grass. Each setting needs to have lots of nature in every view and they need to look well integrated together and not just tacked on.

VFX Tools

I’m a huge proponent of using marketplace assets wherever you can. And that’s where all the stylized VFX came from. The Unreal Marketplace has some really incredible talent on it. And they’re making some fantastic sets that really fit the desired look and feel of my game. Not only does this save on cost, but, more importantly, on time while still yielding a great product. I highly recommend small or solo devs to utilize them for VFX, SFX, and animations. 

Challenges

Overwhelmingly, the biggest challenge was that I was doing this all part time. I’m pretty sure I could have finished the game in 1.5-2 years as opposed to the 3.5 it took had I been on it part time. But that’s just a path I chose not to take so that I could still best take care of my family with my day job while pursuing a personal passion simultaneously. But this came at a heavy mental and time cost. I’d work from 9am-6pm each weekday, be with family for 2 hours, then get “back to work” and jump on the development from 8pm-1am. 

Then on weekends, I’d spend Saturday with my family but then treat Sunday like another full workday, usually going from 9am-10pm. For 3,5 years. But, it doesn’t really stop there because for any Game Developer; the project is practically always on your mind. So even when I wasn’t in the chair, I was problem solving, writing notes, planning, just with every waking moment I had. Looking back at it, had I known it’d be like this going into it, I’m not sure I would’ve ever started.

The other major challenge was just finding and acquiring talent. I depended heavily on the people I was able to hire for the project. From my incredible 2D artist Deftjuzz who’s done all the game’s 2D art, my wonderful friend Axel Suzanne who delivered about 40% of the 3D art, to the musicians, level designers, level artists, and voice talent. It really took a small nation to bring this game to life. But it was super hard just finding people and vetting them. So from doing interviews, designing and conductive art & design tests, negotiating contracts and rates, all of that while doing all the programming, game design, and art direction, it all was very challenging. It was an enormous boost when I started using Work With Indies to find talent. It’s such a great resource for indies to find talent and was where I ended up hiring nearly all of my level designers and level artists.

All in all, it’s been a wild ride, but I’m really proud of what we accomplished. I’m also very thankful to Humble Games for their fantastic support through it all. I don't know what the plans are next, to be honest. I’ve got some small updates I want to make to the game in the way of accessibility features and additional game modes. But beyond that, I think I mainly just need to rest. It’d seem pretty nice being able to just work 1 job a day. You know, like how well adjusted normal people do.

Adam Kareem, Lead Developer 

Interview conducted by Arti Burton