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Summary

Game Description

Break-A-Bot is a fast-paced action roguelike where you smash, slash, and dash through enemy robots—then rip off their arms to upgrade your own. Defend your orbital station against waves of enemies across ever-changing layouts and build wild, modular loadouts with every run.

The Deliverable

For this school project, teams were created at the start of the school year based on the genre they chose. Within this team, we had an entire school year to create a game from concept to release on Steam.

Project Information

  • Engine:
    Unreal Engine 5

  • Platform:
    Steam (PC)

  • Genre:
    Action Roguelike

  • Release Date:
    June 2025

  • Context:
    University Project

  • Project Duration:
    32 Weeks

  • Team Size:
    ~    22 people

  • Deliverable:
    Full Steam Release

Responsibilities

Project Role

In this project, I worked as a Technical and Systems Designer, focusing on designing the Combat of the game.

I also helped with concepting the core game, brainstorming ideas and playtesting.

Contributions

  • Designed the combat and progression system.

  • Created and balanced all 5 Weapon Parts for both the player and enemies:

    • Default Arms

    • Sword

    • Charge Gun

    • Hammer

    • Mine

  • Polished and added game feel to all weapons.

    • Camera Shake

    • Hitstop

    • Push back / forward impulse

  • Implemented all combat VFXs.

  • Implemented meshes and animations for all Weapon Parts.

  • Playtested the combat and iterated.

  • Helped improve some UI elements (Damage Numbers, Weapon Swapping).

  • Collaborating with Enemy Designers on combat interactions and bug fixing.

Process

The Concept

The setting for our game was an Orbital Station with a Retro-Future and Upbeat theme. During the concepting phase, our team decided to go with a top-down roguelike-style game in which you play as a robot called Zippy, who has to get rid of invading robot enemies. While doing so, Zippy steals the parts equipped on the enemies to upgrade himself.

The original concept was to have 2 swappable arm parts for the combat, 1 swappable leg part for different dash abilities and 1 swappable body part with a passive stat boost. However, in the end, we had to scope things down to only having 2 arm parts.

Since we lacked animation power and wanted to have multiple weapons for both the player and enemies to use, we ideated a system in which each arm part would have its own mesh and animations; this way, our animator only had to animate the arm itself instead of the entire body.

Concepting the Parts system

For the weapon parts, we wanted to create a modular system in which new weapons could be prototyped easily while being able to be used by both the player and the enemies.

I proposed a class system in which we have a parent weapon with the base functionality and 3 child classes, melee, ranged and others. These child classes would then only hold functionality specific to their class. The children of each class would be each individual weapon. Looking back, this might have been a bit overcomplicated, which is probably also why we went with a different structure.

The system we ended up using was the Gameplay Ability System (GAS) built into Unreal Engine. Every weapon would be its own ability and have its own Data Asset, which organized things like the name, UI sprite, enemy behavior tree, mesh and animation blueprint.

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