Mirage Knights - Friday Knight Games, multiplayer Souls-Royale prototype
OCT 2023 - MAY 2024

Mirage Knights is a multiplayer Souls-Royale game developed by me and a small group of devs (Friday Knight Games) to pitch to investors/publishers. The premise is simple: 30 players get dropped into a big Dark-Souls-style dungeon full of enemies and loot, either as solos or teams of 3, and the last one (or team) standing wins. Players can defeat monsters, collect items, level up, and infuse their weapons and armor to become stronger than their opponents. A classic Battle Royale closing-circle mechanic forces players together as the match progresses.

Our fully-functioning multiplayer demo was made with a team of 6, two engineers, two designers, an artist, and an animator. As one of the designers, I wrote our big ol’ ~80 page GDD, and was responsible for the design of overall game flow, all of our RPG systems (character attributes, inventory systems and itemization, class design), all our UI, and pretty much all our level and traversal mechanics. Also: our in-game shops. I wrote 99% of the blueprint that drove gameplay, with our engineers handling a lot of network infrastructure and deeper gameplay logic related to our animation-based combat. Our other designer handled combat design, handling most of our melee weapons. Our artist, Liam MacDonald, doubled as our level designer, with myself and him collaborating together on overall direction and flow and him executing on it both both design and art-wise.

The video at the top of the page is a sizzle reel from an early test. A slower-paced tour of our bigger (and primary) second map and some of our gameplay and mechanics can be found right here:

Asset-wise, most of the level geo and some of the characters are from our artist Liam MacDonald, but we supplemented those with some storebought assets from the Unreal store (as placeholders—most of this was never meant to ship, with the exception of the level blockout, which was very very early). Most of the UI icons are stolen from Elden Ring (due to them conveniently being in a nice file format) and are again meant to be placeholders. Much of the VFX is store-bought, but I did a lot of modifications to suit them to our use. SFX is from free libraries and store-bought packs. Enemy assets were mostly store-bought.

The overall design goal for Mirage Knights was to recreate the feeling of an enemy player invasion in Dark Souls at a massive scale. Influences came from Souls, Battle Royales, and MOBAs most prominently, with players dividing their time between safer but less rewarding PvE encounters to gain experience and acquire better gear, and high-risk PvP encounters where you can eliminate other players and teams (and steal their loot). Inventory and leveling systems are greatly simplified to facilitate fast-paced play without a lot of fiddly inventory management (the HUD acts as the inventory management screen with no loss of game focus, MOBA-style), and builds consist of the player’s stat allocations, their weapons (two can be carried at once and swapped between), armor, and “utility” items, which act a little more like MOBA items, where they can be either single-use consumables like wards or firebombs, or more permanent items like boots or helmets which provide passive boosts (and may have an active component as well). Many weapons and armor have special effects (chain-lightning on hit, enhanced jumps/rolls/sprinting, temporary invisibility), and utility items can provide everything from turrets and healing support to portable jump-pads and walls. Many of these items can be seen demoed in the second video.

Ultimately our plans to seek funding for this project didn’t come to fruition, and the team went their separate ways (with some of us moving on to a new project), but we’re all super proud of the demo we made and though there were many aspects of the design which were still in flux at the time we disbanded (the camera and our monetization route being two big ones), there was a lot of chemistry in the design even at this early stage, with fun emergent gameplay arising. There were some weaknesses in enemy design (which were mostly placeholders and didn’t have a real owner, one of the big gaps in our fledgling team), and the sheer scope of the game meant a lot of stuff was very first-pass, but the pieces fit together very well and we felt they had a lot of promise.

The end goal, should the project have continued, was to deliver a single unified experience: one map, one game mode, and hyper-focus on making it maximally replayable, with randomization of loot, encounters, and even certain elements of the level (bosses, hazards) to keep things varied from run to run. Should the game have gotten funding and maintained a player count to support it, more maps, characters, items, and so forth would be released over time. The goal was to manage all this with a team size between 20 and 30 devs, and try to keep things as tight as possible for as long as possible in terms of scope, so as to be able to fund development with a relatively modest number of MAU and build on it over time from early access through release and seasonal content drops. We had a fledgling discord established to start cultivating a community, but obviously development concluded before we got very far.