Systems Designer

Working closely with fellow team member Jackson Hole we took careful consideration in discussing how each system should work. Our workflow started by discussing how fun and easy to understand our pitched systems would be and pitched possible additions and alterations that could be made. Once the base system was implemented, we each prototyped possible modifications to the system and had others test them, for example I proposed an alteration to the Blood Magic system, as we observed players were not swapping their abilities as much as we would have liked, with the only swapping method being the number keys. I proposed that the scroll wheel be used to swap abilities and quickly scripted this change and had players test it, upon play testing this change we found that players still had some confusion on which ability they were switching to with the scroll wheel. Although this change did not have the intended outcome it was a valuable exercise as it led to further discussion on how the Blood Magic system should be handled in which we landed on our final blood magic system, implementing a weapon wheel so players could easily decern what Blood Magic Ability they were swapping to.

Economy Designer

Once systems like the weapons and ability systems were implemented careful balancing was required to make these systems enjoyable to the player, this area of design was my primary role on the Blood Reaver team. My workflow started by mathematically determining how effective each weapon and ability should be, for weapons this was a matter of calculating the damage per second, whereas for abilities it was a matter of calculating the damage per blood spent, allowing abilities to have a wider range of effectiveness at the cost of spending more blood. Once these values were determined extensive playtesting was done to ensure these values were both fair and fun for the player, I tracked stats in game to determine how effective each ability was as well as asked play testers how they felt about each ability. I knew from the inception of the project that balancing this many abilities would be a monumental task especially considering the increasing health of the enemies I wouldn’t have a base variable to work off of. As I continued my workflow, I noticed significant changes in how players interacted with the ability system where early play testers used a single ability as one ability was all they really needed later play testers were using multiple abilities and were actively looking for opportunities to use each one.

Quality Assurance Manager

Throughout production we encountered a number of bugs in our project, being a student team with little experience we didn’t have an established system for logging bugs, I raised this concern with our producer Euan Wynne-Jones midway through production and together we were able to quickly establish an effective bug logging system for the team that I would take control of managing. It was then my job to go through the backlog of bugs that had already been recorded throughout playtesting and created detailed logs for each including recordings, priority and reproduction steps for each.