City Secrets – Content and Narrative Designer
Experience a suspenseful and tense experience of following a coworker in the streets of the fictional city of Kickchago, as you react to random events and try to keep up with your target while staying out of sight.
Artwork by Samuel Currid
- Designed mechanics used in the game, including the core distance mechanic and random events.
- Organized play tests and helped turn relevant feedback into narrative overhauls.
- Assisted with editing gameplay narratives and programming the distance mechanic.
Domain: Digital Warfare – Solo Developer
Domain: Digital Warfare is a small scale real time strategy game developed to focus on rapid deliveries of final content, taking inspiration from Halo Wars and the Dawn of War series and focused on area control and large scale strategies over unit micro.
- Introduced and mastered principles of spiral development, iteratively building game loops in discrete steps at shippable quality.
- Designed, implemented, and polished several mechanics, including camera movement, unit pathfinding, unit selection, unit construction, attacking, fog of war, and skirmish AI.
- Designed and balanced a roster of 8 units and 9 buildings through extensive playtesting sessions and numerous cycles of content development.
- Analyzed best practices of comparable RTS games and decided how best to apply systems to development of smaller scale projects.
- Led functional and playtesting events, analyzed feedback and released new updates based upon actionable data.
Beyond the staple features of the RTS genre, Domain: Digital Warfare also has several mechanics that I’m particularly pleased with, both in design and execution.
Unit Production
Given Domain: Digital Warfare’s focus on being a macro focused RTS, I knew that I wanted to make maintaining your army and expanding your base as simple and intuitive as possible, so that the player could focus on engaging with the map and strategizing how to overcome the enemy rather than micromanaging factories. To this end, I studied other RTS games with a focus on macro and accessibility and made several adjustments with the help of playtesting feedback, including:
- The ability to queue unit construction at multiple factories with a single click.
- The ability to set factories on repeat build mode, so you can set factories to create specific build queues essential to your strategy and not worry about the tedium of queueing them up over and over again.
- The ability to set factory rally points anywhere currently visible on the map, to get newly produced units to the frontlines of combat automatically.
Base Building
Despite being simple however, I wanted to avoid unit production and base building being shallow. In initial versions of Domain: Digital Warfare, too little focus was put into base building, and players felt like building their army had very little options or freedom to optimize. To address these concerns, I tweaked several aspects of both the unit roster and base building, including:
- Revamping building construction to use a free build system rather than pre-placed build locations on the map.
- Introducing two new resources with radically different uses, to force players to make hard choices on build prioritization.
- Introducing a second tier of unit, much more expensive but with proportionate power, as a sink for excess resources and a way to close out drawn out battles.