/// Blacksmith
2018 Internship - Cecly (team of 6)
July 2018 - Sept. 2018 (2 months)
Unity 3D
Blacksmith is a project I worked on during my 3rd year internship. It is an incremental mobile game set in a medieval fantasy world. The player controls a Blacksmith and has to tap the screen to craft and sell weapons, earning more and more money and always increasing their growth rate.
On this project, I was lead designer & technical game designer (more details below).
>. Lead designer
Because the studio I was in was very small, I had the pleasant opportunity to work as the Lead Designer on this project.
My main task as lead designer was to make sure each member in the team had the same vision of the project.
The best way to do this was for me to create clear and precise documents.
These short and efficient documents made us more unified around our game concept and helped create a more coherent experience for the player.
My approach is always very rational. I explain every aspect of a feature, the rules around it, it's conditions, and it's consequences. What I want to avoid is ambiguity.
My intent was also to make my colleague's work easier and exhaustively list everything they needed to know about a feature (as you can see below).
Combo feature document
(click to zoom-in)
Weapons doc for the game artists.
(click to zoom-in)
Here, the "total cost" is automatically calculated, using the function I designed.
Extract from the building's upgrades document
(click to zoom-in)
>. Technical game design
Thanks to my technical skills, I found a way to work more efficiently.
I was in charge of balancing the game, so I made myself a balancing tool, using Unity's scriptable objects and a JSON file to carry all the data I needed.
Thanks to this tool, I was very independent from the programmers, thus greatly improving the workflow, I was very autonomous.
The values from the JSON file were then applied to our Unity scriptable objects system thanks to a C# script that I also did.
The tool made me less dependent on others, and allowed much more balancing iterations.
Various snippets from the balancing JSON file
(click to zoom-in)
Team members:
- Louis Bayard (sound designer)
- Simon Buty (game & UI artist)
- Thibault Magrit (game artist)
- Mickael Mancini (programmer)
