CHROMA -2024 FIEA Capstone -
Responsibilities:
-Lead Designer
As Lead Designer, I ran a team of 5 other designers (3 Technical Designers and 2 Level Designers), I was the vision holder for the project as a whole so it was my responsibility to make sure everything that was produced for the game formed a cohesive whole.
My responsibilities as Lead Designer included:
Running weekly design meetings
Assigning, managing, and giving feedback on the tasks of my direct reports
Designing features and writing documentation that we posted physically on our “Design Wall” so it would be easily accessible to the whole team, where a Google Doc or a Confluence would have required additional steps for individual contributors.
Collaborating with the Lead Artist and Lead Programmer to make sure every discipline knew what they needed to know to minimize blockers and maximize inter-disciplinary collaboration
-Systems Design and Game Balance
A Roguelike Third Person Movement shooter about destroying a factory full of evil robots to save your hometown! CHROMA is a mechanics first shooter with a strong focus on deckbuilding and shot placement. Every shot matters when you can choose from 6 different batteries each with their own unique effects from brainwashing robots to fight by your side, to trapping them in a gravity well. CHROMA also features over 30 upgrades that can appear in the in-game shop that allow the player to customize their build and make every run feel unique.
I designed and implemented CHROMA’s entire progression system, I specifically devoted a lot of my time to developing a tool to effectively quantify player power, so I could make sure that the relationship between the player and the enemies was always difficult but still allowed the player to have hard evidence that they are getting stronger. This was difficult given the constraints of a Rougelike with only 5 encounters so I made spreadsheets for everything.
Nadia’s Backpack containing every one of the batteries she can collect in her fight through the factory.
DPU Calculator Sample
This “DPU Calculator” is a tool I wrote that allows me to get the approximate value of every bullet type and upgrade in the game in terms of damage per shot(The full spreadsheet with my formulae and data is available in the “Spreadsheets” tab along with a mathematical model I made of the Pokémon GO game economy)
This is the Leaper!
I worked closely with our AI Engineer to determine its attack behaviors and sensory parameters, eventually settling on a behavior tree that resembled a Finite State Machine. I tuned these parameters as well as those for the the other enemies using Excel and Unreal Data Tables like the one below!
Implementation
In terms of actually implementing balance changes in Unreal Engine 5 I used Excel Spreadsheets like the one seen below that describes the combat behavior of the Leaper Enemy that backed Unreal Data Tables using Unreal’s Gameplay Attribute System(GAS) and C++, though I eventually transitioned to making the changed in the data tables directly because it was more efficient and let me test my changes more easily.