GAMEPLAY DESIGN
The area of design in which I feel most comfortable is Gameplay design. It's when it comes to defining the heart of the experience, the set of rules and sensations around which the game revolves, that I find my work most effective.
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I naturally gravitate towards minimalist, rational designs, always taking the project's intentions as my starting point. But I'm trying more and more to go beyond this model to propose more vibrant and singular designs.
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This is the aspect that I think drives me in Game design, seeing how the question of "good design" is never simple, and how you have to adapt to each project to shape it in the best possible way.
IN MY PROJECTS
Altered by Equinox
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The starting point of Altered was to provide unique cards, generated via an algorithm that can be found in boosters. I joined the team when the project began and we didn't know how the game was going to be played at the time. So it was with this constraint in mind that we developed the game's core gameplay, taking into account other parameters such as the need to offer a game with a non-violent gameplay conveying the company's humanist values, or to be clearly distinguishable from Magic, the leader in the field to which many games tend to resemble.
Base card
Rare version
One of the unique versions
To bring unique cards to life, the key notion is to have enough possible variations so that the algorithm can generate a number of cards large enough to never run out of possibilities. For this reason, the cards have five numerical values that can be altered, in addition to an effect that can be broken down into several lines and attributes. In this way, variations increase exponentially for each modifiable parameter.
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As for non-violence, I conducted a benchmark on two-player opposition games, which were perceived positively and didn't seem to emphasize a sense of confrontation. What this study helped me to understand was that we needed a neutral material that could be used to measure players' progression. By shifting the win condition to an object that doesn't belong to any player, we no longer play to beat the opponent, but to complete the shared objective. In the final game, this objective is represented by expeditions that players must lead by playing cards on them.
It wasn't easy to find solutions to all these constraints. I sometimes observed inconsistencies between different elements, such as being accessible and at the same time proposing something unique and with a lot of numerical values on the cards. But often the solution lies in acting methodically, deconstructing one's certainties to find a new way of doing things, prioritizing the areas that seem most important. It's this aspect of the project that I'm most proud of today, the way the game has evolved from its constraints to become something quite unique in the TCG sphere.
Sentinel by Breaking Walls
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The goal of the project was to deliver a game within 10 weeks of work for a team of 7 interns. Although this experience could be similar to a student project, this time we had the support of the studio, and the objective was to make a game that was destined to be released, and for which we had to take into account numerous features such as localization, successes, different configurations, keyboard/joystick support, and so on.
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This very short timeframe led to a number of design choices in order to get to production as quickly as possible and concentrate on the essentials. So we came up with a game with a roguelite feel, featuring a series of runs through enemy-filled rooms. Between runs, you earn resources that can be used to buy the game's five weapons, eight skills and statistical upgrades. Add efficient enemies to the mix, a few LD elements and that's about it for the time available.
The challenge for us was to create enough replayability by making these elements as interesting as possible. For example, here are the weapons:
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Disruptor: a shotgun that encourages hand-to-hand combat, an easy-to-master starting weapon.
Bouncing Betty: a machine gun whose bullets bounce back, increasing damage and inviting you to use the walls.
Kaboom 3000: a mine-laying weapon, which can be detonated after three mines have been laid - powerful but very risky.
Maelstorm: sends shots automatically all around the player, who can recall the projectiles towards themselves like a magnet, increasing their damage and inviting the player to line up between their shots and their targets.
Nova Cannon: a sniper that takes time to charge a straight energy beam that passes through shields.
Each weapon is very unique in the gameplay it offers, with damage and rate values changing drastically as well, giving the impression of playing a different game every time. Coupled with the skills, the intention was to ensure that there were elements to be discovered in the game over several playthroughs.
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To understand the design of these weapons, we also need to look at the enemies for a moment. There are many different types we could talk about, but I especially want to take a moment on the enemy we used to call the "jackpot". This was an orb that moved towards the player like the other enemies, but caused an explosion when it was killed. This was at the heart of the game's concept, and added a little salt to the experience. In fact, these enemies are placed in large numbers behind the others. The player's objective is to reach this enemy, kill it and cause a chain of explosions with the other enemies of this type nearby. The gameplay is a kind of brick-breaker, in which you have to place a projectile correctly to achieve devastating results.
And each of its weapons interacts differently with this mechanic, the shotgun inviting you to get close from one side to make it explode, the submachine gun to find the right bounce, the mines to wait for the jackpots to be placed on them, the maelstorm to align the jackpots between the shots and the player, and finally the sniper to succeed in aiming at it by charging the weapon correctly.
Bloody Dates!
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The project began with a first differentiating element: tactical gameplay in which you can choose your enemies! This is a very strong constraint for which we had to find solutions, in particular to gamify this part and succeed in keeping control over the experience.
The first step was to list the many ways in which you could choose your enemies and try to link them to tactical gameplay. We then evaluated the ideas, keeping only the best. At the end of the brainstorming, we opted for one of the simplest systems, which is to see a list of enemies and say yes or no to them, representing this with a dating app. Not without flaws, this solution has the advantage of being very meaningful to anyone who has ever heard of Tinder, as well as being perfectly adapted to the mobile medium by taking advantage of its conventions. Taking the game in this direction taught me an important lesson: Cool matters. It's a formulation that's not without a certain ridicule, but one that should be added to the list of points to keep in mind when designing. What's missing is a definition of what's cool and what's not, but that's a thought for another time.
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To make this choice impactful, we've linked it as closely as possible to what you'd find on a dating app: the enemies you come across have a photo and bio, as well as descriptive keywords. These elements are written to be consistent with the context of a dating app, while giving clues to the gameplay of the monsters. Because in order to follow the initial constraint, it was necessary to create a tactical game with few characters, but that are highly-characterized and that contrast sharply with each other, something that can be seen right from the choice phase.
There's a lot more to say, but I need to talk a little about combat. To go along with mobile, combat is minimalist, on small grids and with few elements but with a strong impact. The game works on a 2AP system - for 2 action points - which means you generally make a movement and then an action. It's a highly effective system, as found in XCOM and other tactical games inspired by it, and invites you to focus on skills where tactical interest lies. Skill-based gameplay is perfect for us, allowing us to easily thematize enemies.
Over the course of testing and integration, we steered the game towards asymmetry, which had a number of advantages for our gameplay, including an intense sense of power when playing as a single character against multiple opposing ones. This system led us to derive from 2AP for the player character, who has several moves and actions per turn. Enemies, on the other hand, continue to operate with this simple and effective system.
Colorful Complexions
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A visual novel may be a game format that focuses on narrative, but it's no less important to design the core of the game. In my case, this was what inspired me most about the project. After a great deal of thought and iteration, we decided that the storytelling should be conveyed in a way that seemed elegant and modern, taking inspiration from chat applications such as iMessage from Iphone or Messenger from Meta.
This format led to other design choices, such as concentrating on short, subtext-loaded answers, or limiting the dialogue with characters to two answer options.
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Post-mortem note: the decision we made to place the conversation in the center of the screen seemed pertinent, but it had the effect of putting distance between the characters, which wasn't optimal for the intimate atmosphere we were aiming for.
Virtual Breach
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The constraint of playing with one button led me to approach arcade games during my research. In the end, I decided to take inspiration from Atari's Tempest, whose vector-based visuals really appealed to me. I chose to concentrate on movement, as I wanted to move away from my inspiration that placed shooting mechanics at the heart of the game. As a result, I was able to concentrate on a dynamic dodging game whose difficulty lay in its increasing speed and the need to remain attentive. To support these choices, the rounds are short, with instant death if you make a mistake, but allowing you to start a new round as quickly as possible.
Sand Rush
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A large part of our time on the project was spent working on the 3Cs. We knew that this was an essential part of making an action game. With the help of my team members, I came up with character actions that would allow the player to express their skill, and that were interdependent to encourage the player to use different skills each time.
Abawari
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In role-playing games, the core of the gameplay is mainly defined by the action resolution system, which can be blurred in the case of narrative projects. In our case, one of the initial intentions was to offer a game focused on combat, with a very systemic approach.
From this starting point, in collaboration with two other designers, I developed an action resolution system to highlight our intentions. Character skills are infinitive verbs - persuade, craft, dodge - used to perform an action. Each skill is rated from 1 to 5, a number that indicates the number of dice to be rolled. These skills are also associated with characteristics - strength, intelligence, sociability - also scored from 1 to 5, which define the number of faces on the dice rolled - the higher the score, the fewer faces. Finally, the dice with the lowest value is kept, as it must be less than or equal to difficulty levels in order to determine whether an action is successful.
This system proved to be very interesting statistically: skills allow more dice to be rolled, which reduces variance and ensures globally correct results. That's the acquis. Characteristics reduce the number of faces, allowing more spectacular successes, but are more unpredictable. That's the innate.