Seize Studios 2023
Roles and Duties: Game Designer, responsible for:
Balancing combat
Player characters' movements and abilities
Game economy
Minigame’s level design
Gameplay progression
I joined the Seize Studios' team when the game What The Duck was in production. They had a prototype and were working on the vertical slice. The team wanted to re-evaluate aspects of the combat system, economy, and minigames. Then I started by analyzing the systems, breaking down what problems were there, and suggesting ways of improving them.
As the suggestions were discussed and approved by the team, I helped to document the new designs and kept iterating on them during the 1 year and a half I worked on the project. I was responsible for communicating the designs to the programming team and verifying the result as it was implemented.
A snippet of the weapons balancing spreadsheet
Special Duck interaction during boss fight
Combat System
Designing the combat system and its progression was one of the main challenges I had. In What The Duck the player gets stronger by crafting new weapons. There are:
More than 20 weapons the player can craft
Each one with different skills
To balance the combat, spreadsheets were created to compare the player's status with the enemies’ status using DPS (damage per second) and the number of hits to kill before implementing the values in the engine.
Contact
Feel free to reach out. I would appreciate a coffee chat!
E-mail: ana.carolina.m.franca@gmail.com