For my end of studies project at ISART Digital, I pitched a Beat Them All game in a hack&slash style. This pitch was one of the few selected and is now known as LYSFANGHA. Made to be played with a controller, it is a unique solo-player cooperative experience.
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To follow the game on social media, you can find our Twitter HERE, our Instagram HERE, and our Youtube channel HERE.
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In LYSFANGHA, you embody the half-goddess Imë in her task to retrieve the Lysfangha from its temple. Using her powers over time, you will duplicate yourself by going back in time. You will have to strategize the best way to work with a growing horde of your past selves and repel the invasion!
My role during this production concerned those topics:
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Game Design:
As Game Designer on this project, I took the responsibility of doing the Game Design Document, and the spreadsheets that were used for the making of the game.
Including but not limited to: The scoring sheet, the game's rhythm & time repartition, the player's attacks frame data, the enemy data, the depth matrix...
Further details on precisely what this role concerned below:
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System Design:
As the original pitcher of the game, I started pre-production on multiple things during the summer, but mostly the main original feature of the game: Remnants.
This idea of Cooperating with clones of your past selves was hard to put in place and needed a bit of discussion among the team and other Game Designers to fully settle down.
I also designed macro-systems using the mindset "If this game was longer than the 10 minutes we are imposed for this exercise, what would the systems look like".
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Level Design:
I did the Level design of the two tutorial Levels (Dark Twins and Guardian Rock), and of the last level (Family Reunion). Implemented them, and the one I did not design, using Probuilder for the blocking in Unity directly so it would be easy to access and tweak.
This was a complicated task because of the way the game loop works.
The levels can't be too big, because it would take too much time to traverse them and we are on a timer. The entrance has to be relatively close to the various points of interest of the level while maintaining a good flow and a balance of attention between the different paths.
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Combat/Encounter Design:
I participated in the design of the monsters and how they function, did the AI State Machines flowcharts, and balanced their data (health, speed, range...).
I made the Encounter Design of the levels, trying to create as much interaction between the groups of enemies as possible, and implemented it. This includes the Encounter Design of the Challenge mode as well.
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Narrative Design:
I created the lore and universe of the game using early concept arts from our artists.
It was locked early in the production and made to be as expansive as possible, regarding the directions we might want to take for the project later.
I then designed the narrative experience of the player, laying down what will be told and shown about the lore, and what won't be.
This regroups designing the narrative environment, structure, content... It included doing an early draft of the dialogues of the game, highlighting what happens in each dialogue, and setting the tone for the characters and the game. This early placeholder dialogue was to be cut down and re-written later by another Game Designer of the team.
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QA Testing:
I was the main QA tester of the project, and made the bug list and maintained it during the whole project to maximise the ease of use for our programmers.
