Our largest update for Doom: Eternal was recently released with a bevy of new features like a horde mode and new master levels. My largest contribution was my work towards a new playable character called the dread knight in our multiplayer mode.
This is our first playable melee aggro character and was a lot of fun to prototype. My initial work started around February of 2020 and over the past 18 months it has gone through many iterations and design changes. Some of the major challenges required to implement the dread knight include:
- Multi-hand melee combos using collision tests based on animation events
- Animation FSM and blend tree implementation for first and third person models
- Special physics for the teleport and ground slam spline
- Consequences of invisibility for the enshroud ability
- Server and client authority and messaging
You can see a sample of the playable dread knight gameplay below.
