My Work : Darkest Dungeon Modding : The Black Reliquary : My Resume : About Me
Steam Page for the Black Reliquary
What is the Black Reliquary?
The Black Reliquary is a total overhaul mod for Darkest Dungeon. Its goal is to completely replace the game’s setting, enemies, locations, and story and redo the gameplay such that it feels like an entirely new game. Even at its current incomplete status, the Black Reliquary is one of if not the largest and most ambitious Darkest Dungeon mods currently available.
The Black Reliquary adds entirely new dungeons to visit and enemies to conquer on your journey while retaining the classic Darkest Dungeon heroes and formula.
What did I do on the Black Reliquary?
I am a programmer and designer on the Black Reliquary, and have made several contributions to the mod as a whole. A few of my contributions include:
- Participating in several design meetings, ranging from overhauling parts of combat, heroes, and trinkets, to designing new monsters, curios, and trinkets, to working with a smaller sub team to design the Judicator for Black Reliquary.
- Worked alongside several artists, animators, and other programmers to efficiently complete tasks and reach key development checkpoints.
- Coordinating with the project manager to separate into sub-teams and pursue different goals, such as the Exposed Interior dungeon and Judicator hero class.
- Implementing the initial version of the Expiated and Amberblighted Actor Dot, the reworks for several heroes and hero trinkets, and the Judicator hero itself.
Meet the Judicator, the first new hero currently in development for the Black Reliquary. I am the programmer and one of the designers for the Judicator, and had to figure out how to properly implement several experimental features when coding her, sometimes tweaking her design when an element wasn’t working quite right or was impossible to implement as intended.
What did I get from working on the Black Reliquary?
The Black Reliquary has served to be a microcosm of game development as a whole, and I’ve gotten several takeaways and experiences from it already, including:
- Working on a large team, particularly a large team of designers that can have different opinions.
- Working with contractors that may not always be consistently available.
- Working under a creative director and project manager.
- Collaborating with other programmers using github and other version control software.
- Creating tools for use during development.
- Communicating and collaborating with other specialties such as artists, animators, and sound designers on a large project.
- Experimenting with pre-existing code to discover the limits of what is currently available for use.
Ultimately, my experience working with the Black Reliquary team has been a capstone of all of my time doing Darkest Dungeon modding, and has better prepared for larger projects in game development, as is often the case with former modders moving into the game industry.
One of, if not the, hardest features to implement with the Black Reliquary were the new Actor DOT based status effects. These required making clever use of several in game mechanics to look right, and a collaborative effort between several experienced programmers. I even programmed special tools to help speed up and proofread their creation.
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