Loot & Loot Distribution: Worked with all level designers to distribute loot in a thematic way across the entire game. This also included setting up import/export pipeline and readable distribution sheets for the level designers. Also includes implementation
Runes & Shards: Designed and implemented Rune system. Additionally implemented slot configurations and effects on weapons, shields, and lantern.
Weapons: Designing and implementing the player weapons in the game. Working with art and production to match appearance needs and time limits for the project.
Community Outreach: Liaised with various streamers on rapid interation post release,
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Melee Combat Animations: Worked directly with animators and mocap to create and implement player combat animations, combat flow, cadence, and timings.
Loot: Created and implemented assets for looting, including item level ups, runes, weapons, armor, and more. Established rules for how this loot is reflected in the world.
Game Balance: Setup complex sheets for live data import/export, analysis, combat simulations, and proofs of concept. This includes documentation, pipeline proposals, and frameworks for various systems, major and minor.
Armor: Co-designed armor needs based on design and balance necessities. Worked together with art team to ensure majority of our thematics were met to ensure a solid distribution of mechanics across different armor sets.
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New Game +: Designed and implemented New Game+ system, along with pipelines for future implementations.
Inventory: Designed inventory system at a high level for design needs. Worked with UI to ensure inventory management system had all necessary information, widgets, and functionality.
Player Stats: Designed and implemented player resistances, defense system, attack system, and overall stats.
Playstation Specific Systems: Documented and designed activities and haptic feedback systems.
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The Lords of the Fallen is a single/multiplayer player soulslike. It features a dual realm system a la Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, giving the player a second chance at redemption in combat, as well as providing new traversal and exploration methods, putting a spin on the traditional corpse run in soulslikes.
The majority of my work on this project was centered around player combat, RPG, and progression. While we had a smaller team for a game of this scope, the majority of the team was senior or close to senior, resulting in incredibly fast implementations. |
RPG SystemsLoot & Loot Distribution: Constituting a great deal of time, this started off as a brainstormed list of things we needed. Aside from the obvious ones from every souls like, we also added a few extras that we wish existed in other souls likes, as well as system-specific items for us. This list was slowly whittled down as some items were not as usable or half-baked, until we reached a more final list. The next step was distribution, which required creation of a sheet detailing which enemies are in which areas as well as the themes of each area (ex. Attestant, Rhogar, Umbral, Axiom).
After this, we split the items into different rarities, then put them together into bundles and distributed them into the world, along with difficulties for how difficult each bundle should be to find. The final step was thematizing the more rare items, such as adding a runed halo type effect to the top of umbral bellies that had Sanguinarix upgrades, or crystals around rune tablets. Runes & "Shards": Runes were always going to be included, and were fairly straightforward. The big part was deciding the rune shapes we wanted, and what they meant. Originally, I had requested a rune word type of system a la Diablo 2, but we ended up gravitating away from this, as the rune shapes are effectively carrying the same weight, and becomes much more approachable. "Shards", or the umbral eyeballs, were tasked with a goal of having micro game changing effects. These began originally as armor set effects, but eventually it was decided that the lamp should be upgradeable, and all of these effects received an umbral twist and moved over to the lamp. It is worth noting that some of the shards began as coders adding it "cool" effects, and us wanting to not abandon the code, so we worked them into the shards instead. Player Stats: We knew from the jump that we wanted six stats at most: two physical damage centric, two magic damage centric, and two more for utility. While this part was easy, we also wanted to ensure that the player has a baseline of stats that we can assume based on player level for the purposes of progression, so we also baked in a player's stats having a baseline rise no matter where the points go, then have extras based on the stat specialties. This enabled us to make various assumptions for progression and region scalars later on. |
Combat DesignMelee Combat Animations: Melee combat is what sets the tone for the entire game. The initial test for this was to gather information, or frame data from all other soulslike references. Afterwards, I joined mocap sessions to ensure the animation format was being followed, so the animator can have the easiest time for implementation. I requested a toolset that allowed us on design to rapidly iterate. The main tool used allows us to set animation montage sections, then use a notify state to set the duration of these sections. The sections will then dilate themselves to the time we needed. This tool enabled us to get frame-perfect results, which is very necessary in a soulslike. Differences of 1 frame can account for a tremendous change in cadence for any weapon, so we needed to have absolute perfection in this regard. Once the mocap was pulled in, I initially timed the animation using the tool to the timings we needed, and we adjusted from there. Some animations simply did not work out, or found homes in other weapons, saving us time in the end. Originally we only planned for a combo of 3 light attacks (1-2-3-2-3-etc.), but a request born from early feedback requested me to push this to five light attacks. Unfortunately, we did not have any mocap budget left, so this was all cobbled together from existing animations in a short amount of time. I believe we did extremely well for what we have, and I anticipate the next title to be even better. The rest of the process for the attacks involved setting up export sheets and data analysis for dps and attack movement value settings, setting up attack direction, hurt reaction expectations, and hitstop values, along with many other attack-specific settings. Weapons: A bit more straight forward than the player animations, weapons began as a count we wanted to reach. After this, I benchmarked different weapon families and their strengths/weaknesses. This informed a great deal of other systems, including RPG, player animations, and more. This benchmark became a frequent "check-in" that I did on a near weekly basis to make sure it was being followed. The weapons themselves were further divided into rarity and affiliations (attestant, rhogar, umbral, or axiom). These two settings informed all the other systems for what that weapon did, and then we let the appearance of the weapon have a bit of a guiding hand in what it did as well. Rarity was typically driven by the "cool" factor of the weapon. I also did the initial setup for weapon level ups and progression, with the other designer eventually taking over as the player animations ate up the majority of the time I had, and more. Armor: Following much the same track as Weapons, armor was a bit more simplified as there are no level ups for armor, so instead each set was given a "goal" based on affiliation, then scaled up or down based on rarity and appearance. Originally, armor did have rune sockets, but these effects were eventually migrated to the shield in order to give shields a more interesting purpose. |
Game Balance/MiscellaneousProgression/New Game +: My main difficulty in this was coming to terms with the level of difficulty expected from a soulslike. Normally, I am a firm believer in approachable, yet difficult design, but we relied heavily on RPG to do the carrying for difficulty in Lords. Being in charge of region scalars, I initially requested analytics that would be automatically sent to a google sheet detailing basic player information: what level are you, how much vigor do you have, what level is your highest weapon, what is your stats, etc. Due to how tight our scheduling was, I was not able to get this, so instead I created a very large google form, and collected data in this manner.
I also requested tools that would automatically gather what enemy spawns are in each area. Pulling all of this data, as well as my loot distribution, I created a "forecast" for what level the player would be in which sections, added a bit of extra due to player death and successful corpse runs, then generated the initial region scalar values as a result from this. The region scalars initially focused only on amplifying enemy health, damage output, and resistances, but grew to include stagger health and vigor amount. All of these were re-balanced again and again based on internal and external feedback. The entire above process was also followed for New Game +, but the process was a bit different as I did not have to account for weapon level up progression, so the curves were much flatter than the base region scalars. Additionally, New Game + includes curves for bosses, which required a bit of a change to their stats, since the scalars only amplified health and not defenses. Inventory: Due to the complexities of design and RPG elements in the UI, I created a working proof of concept UI in sheets to demonstrate the needs design had for the UI and flow. This proof of concept allowed you to choose your weapons and pulled the data live from other sheets to generate accurate to form information, so it could be cross referenced for efficacy during actual implementation. Playstation Specific: Due to releasing on Playstation, we had a need for activities to be specified. I created this list, but the main thing I wanted was an activity to skip the title screen if you clicked it and dive right into the game. This was a small yet welcome thing that I read about constantly in player feedback from other titles. Community Outreach: I was in constant communication with consultants for our PVP as well as post launch content. This feedback was disseminated throughout the company as needed so we could keep up our daily patching early on. |
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