Play as a thirsty vampire!
Meet creatures on dating apps and ambush them.
But they won't give in: fight to drink their blood!
Tactical Mobile
for 8 months between October 2023 et May 2024
Team: 13 – including 3 game designers
Tools: Unity | Google Suite | Notion | Jira | Perforce
Skills: Gameplay design | Rational design | UX design
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.
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.
Being a tactical, it was necessary to translate the game into statistics and numerical ratings. We chose values in the tens range, as low as possible to be easier to interpret by our mobile target, but not too low so as to give us enough design flexibility with +1 or -1 additions that wouldn't unbalance everything. To translate the values into useful data for the game, we created spreadsheets for each element that convert the enemies into a power value called PowerIndex.
Over the iterations we've been able to fine-tune this tool so that the values that emerge are as close as possible to the real experience. If it's not always perfect, the system helps generate discussions that always lead to design improvements. Monsters are rated in several categories according to their power value. Numerous spreadsheet functions have been added to highlight useful information and redistribute it to important pages, notably to facilitate communication with programmers.
With tactical games, and even more so on mobile, it's essential to put a lot of energy into the UX. This is something we've been working on throughout the production, and that's reflected in various elements: most of the game's controls work with movements adapted to cell phones, such as swiping or dragging, but everything can also be done with a tap; there's a strategic mode to obtain precise information on specific elements; most of the game can be played with a straightforward gameplay, but requires more thought solely to get the maximum score. Tests guided these choices throughout production. But what was an important part of my work and what I'd like to talk about here is the game's tutorial.
I designed the major part of the tutorial, and then we worked on it with the team. The main constraint was that we needed to focus on a 10-minute experience for this project. In a real game, the elements could be taught over a longer period of time. For this reason, the heart of the thinking was to define what needed to be taught and what didn't, to ensure that the tutorial remained concise despite the quantity of game elements. So I tried to concentrate only on the essentials. To communicate what I had in mind, I made a document on Adobe XD that shows every screen of the game from start to finish with the tutorial. You can view it here:
In this tutorial, players are accompanied by a servant used as a medium to provide information. In addition, the instructions given are forced to ensure that our players perform them, helping them understand the game elements. The tutorial has greatly improved the overall comprehension. Players have told us that they found the game much deeper and more interesting from one build to the other, even though nothing had changed apart from the addition of the tutorial.
