Game: Smoke and Sacrifice
Role: Associate Designer
Genre: Open-World Action RPG
Release: 31th May 2018 | 21st January 2019
Platform: PC, Switch | PS4, Xbox One
Engine: Unity
Description
Smoke and Sacrifice is an open-world, narrative-driven RPG, where exploiting living ecosystems is the key to your survival. Craft, fight, survive and explore in your quest for the truth.
Solar Sail Games was an indie company of 4 people so my role required me to wear many hands. My role as Associate Designer entailed designing, prototyping and implementing creatures and fauna within the world's ecosystem, refining the combat and gameplay, improving the 3Cs, balancing the game, finding and fixing bugs.
Responsibilities
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Quest and Level Design
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Designed and implemented biomes to house individual ecosystems that drove the game's core loops.
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I iterated on level design throughout the development to refine gameplay, pacing and champion the player experience.
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Working closely with the Art Director, I developed landmarks and wayfinding suitable to an isometric game.
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Designed and implemented main and optional side quests across the game creatively reusing assets and quest logic to populate the player experience.
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Designed and implemented challenging boss fights creatively reusing abilities and systems developed for other content across the project.
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Creature and Fauna Design
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Designed, prototyped and implemented creatures and fauna to populate and support the game world's ecosystem.
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Designed creature behaviours and gameplay interactions to create engaging and emergent content to support the core gameplay loop.
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Iterated on creature design and implementation through playtesting and feedback loops with variation members of the team and external QA.
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Combat and Core Gameplay
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Refined the game's combat and core gameplay loop through iterative design adding movement and combat abilities to broaden the range of player actions and challenges they could face.
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Improve and iterated upon the games 3Cs to make them more responsive and intuitive when faced with the challenge of 2D art set within an isometric game world.
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Created and balanced a range of weapons, abilities and items that could be harvested and crafted by interfacing with the fauna and creatures of the world.
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Balanced the entire game towards the player fantasy and expected player experience using player feedback and playtesting to identify improvements and issues.
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Created and maintained associated design documentation covering the various core mechanics and systems, meta-game systems and a balancing tracker.
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Game Balancing
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Collaborated closely with engineering and technical animation to develop a dynamic 'Push' system. This would allow the player character to be placed within a sequence when walking towards one of the villains, they would then be physically pushed and redirected back onto the critical path within said sequence.
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Created and maintained associated design documentation covering the functionality of the system and implementation steps.
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Balanced gameplay and meta-game systems across the project.
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QA
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Adapted my responsibilities and priorities as the project progressed towards release, supporting the project in a QA capacity where I coordinated with outsourced QA to identify and fix issues.
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