Unholy Tactics - Insight

In Unholy Tactics you play as an evil enchantress who is taking over the world with her undead army. As a player you must cleverly command your evil warriors and utilize their black magic to the fullest to complete your unholy conquest.

Unholy Tactics - 2. Semester Project - Gameplay - Toni Winkler
Unholy Tactics - 2. Semester Project - Gameplay - Toni Winkler
Unholy Tactics - 2. Semester Project - Gameplay - Toni Winkler

Overview

Unholy Tactics grew during production from an overscoped dream to a very focused student project.

Initial ideas of a freely explorable world where you switch to turn-based battles, the soul system or the possibility to craft your own units with corpse parts gained through battles had to give way to simplified systems. Some of these were cut before they were fully designed and gave me the opportunity to focus more on balancing.

In the future, I would not put such amounts of data into one gigantic spreadsheet to keep a better overview.

The following page merely highlights some aspects of what I did for this project.

      Genre: Turn based Tactics Game
      Engine: Unity 2022.3
      Team Size: 11
      Duration: 10 Weeks
      Completion: August 2023
      Platform: PC
      Tools used: Unity, Google Sheets, Photoshop, Jira, Confluence, Drawio,

Role(s) and Responsibilities:

  • System Design: Designed the Ability System, the Progression System and Systems as the Perk System, XP-System that were cut in the end.
  • Game Balancing: Oversaw that the game felt interesting to the player at any stage of the game and discussed plans and user-stories with the Level Designers
  • Playtesting: Regular playing and reviewing Playtests from Testers from outside of the Team.
  • Documentation: I kept all game features updated and made sure they were linked to related pages and are easily readable

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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.

Unholy Tactics - 2. Semester Project - Game Loop - Toni Winkler

 

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.

Unholy Tactics - 2. Semester Project - Progression Logic / Progression Balancing - Toni Winkler

 

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.

Unholy Tactics - 2. Semester Project - Level Design - Toni Winkler

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.