Game Design
PlayerFlow
I created the technical Game Loop in order for Engineers and UI/UX to know at what point in time the player and the AI does what.
The Game's Progression
I worked on several versions of a leveling system with perks and stat growth where the player could spend a currency to level up units. It was simplified to a linear, passive stat growth before we got rid of leveling altogether.
What remained was a progression like in Plants VS Zombies, where the player could unlock new spells for their units by winning a level. This newly unlocked spell is then the intended solution for the next map.
I made this table and iterated with the level designers this player progression according to theme and layout of the map.
Game Balancing
To get an overview of all stats and abilities, I iterated several times during production on this large spreadsheet with power level calculations, ability cost calculations, and kills per turn of abilities against different units.
I updated it first according to playtesting with the paper prototype and later with actual builds and iterations in Unity, keeping in mind that some features were not yet ready for testing and some features or stats were cut entirely.
Game Balancing Guidelines
I have balanced all the abilities and stats of the player and enemy units in the game. As a basis, I gave myself some basic rules at the beginning:
- Less randomness = more control for the player: the more the player can win with his wits, the more he feels in control and can better live out their evil power fantasy. I was given stats such as crit, block and hit chance, damage ranges and the ability to change all stats through status effects. I decided to only give the player units strong crit values and debuff effects to reduce the chance of being hit.
- Abilities have to be meaningful. I wanted to accomplish this by making them work in niche situations, such as specific enemy encounters or by combining them with other abilities.
- Avoid situations where a player's ability "almost" kills an enemy unit to avoid frustration. To achieve this, I tailored the health and damage values as appropriately as possible.
- The summoned player units "grow" into their roles as they progress. Since we had a leveling system planned, I had already laid the groundwork for how their stats increase with each level up. This had to be changed to assign each unit their role from the start, since the leveling system was removed, and to not misinform the player about their unit's abilities.
- I wanted to have large damage numbers to make the player believe that they do large amounts of damage in order to support the power fantasy even more. This was scrapped during production because it was more important for the testers to make informed decisions. It was also easier to balance and iterate quickly.
Level Design
Later in production, I worked on 3 maps. I used an earlier map for the mine level and for the final fight against the Pope in the castle.
In the mines map, I wanted to emphasize the Shadow Shot ability, which can shoot through walls. Therefore, the enemy units had to approach the player along winding paths.
The castle map was the final level. I wanted the player to utilize the most knowledge about the game. I used the hardest enemies to keep this a challenging encounter, while still timing the spawns in order to give enough time to deal with already standing enemies.
I also edited the enemy spawns in the waterway map to make the fireball spell the best solution for this map. I added packs of fairy enemies with low health/medium damage dealing enemies to emphasize the use of the just unlocked AoE ability Fireball I have also changed the spawn position of the Queen. This allows the player to redirect enemies to different paths by positioning the Queen.
Learnings
Component based Abilities
Our team implemented abilities as they saw fit. One after another. Late in production I found a video that if we knew earlier could saved us a lot of our struggle. Making abilities based off of components
Testing InGame is better than calculating in spreadsheets
Balacing in spreadsheets is pointless if the abilities aren't in game. Regular playtests in the later weeks were crucial to balance abilities and units effectively. In this small scale even more so than the Power Level calculation
Reference playing without documentation
It is difficult to get the rest of the team on board with references if one does not document their findings. Screenshoots or video footage should be made to make any discussion over the reference more effective.
Guiding Level Design
Having clearly defined restrictions and goals for a level is crucial to help level designers in their process and to figure out if a level meets the quality standarts.