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- Amarthëna -

Project Goals

I worked on this personal project to improve my Systems and Content design skills by creating a set of champions for an hypothetical turn-based tactical game inspired by Waven's Early Alpha (0.8). I also wanted to see if I was able to derive meaningful character abilities out of thematics like love, redemption or free will.


The final result are 22 characters with unique abilities, and overarching systems to define how core rules like

turn-taking, character actions and stats role work together.

Content Design

This is how a finalised character concept looks like.

Design time took between 2h and 5h depending on the character's complexity.

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My content design process was the following:

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1. Find the character's fantasy. What part of the theme do I want to explore and with what angle ? What is the experience about ? How realistic or abstract do I want to be ? What words does this theme bring to mind, and how can I translate them into concrete mechanics ?

For Olidea, the sacrifice fantasy revolves around Pride, Hierarchy and Grim Holyness. Very far from sacrifice as a way to help others or to just do your job as a priestess.

2. Better define the character fantasy via its background (sometimes, 3 and 2 would be inverted). How can they be more than just units on an arena ? How can their fantasy support their gameplay and vice-versa ?

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Her background helped me define how spells like Daring Trade and The Servile Ones would use the core mechanic

3. Design the core mechanic that will structure the character's gameplay. This would  answer questions about the depth, complexity, flexibility and open-endedness of the core mechanic.

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The offerings mechanic came with 3 key design choices: can't be produced from nothing, meant to be consumed and only way of interaction with the opponent.

4. First pass for the character abilities: how much offense, defense and buff skills ? How do each spell support the core mechanic by adding variation or synergies ? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the set ?

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Olidea's kit is designed around offense, buffs, and to quickly create an opportunity for Daring Trade. She thus lacks defense and control, and has to play from the backline to optimise her passive

5. Succintly describe each ability. At that point, I would not care about specifics like cost, range or stats. Only about what the ability does and what is its purpose in the set

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An example of how I would draft a spell, here by realising that I wanted to provide the player with an indirect way to influce offerings' creation

6. Define the Race Trait and Stats: this would decisively answer the question "where am I directing this character's gameplay" ? At that point, I would have spent 1 or 2 hours (depending on the character's complexity) for the "pre-design" phase, followed by the two final (and longer) steps.

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Because I wanted Olidea to heavily rely on her offerings and proper positionning, she has very low mobility and basic attack damage even compared to other Disruptors, but the highest initiative in the roster.

    7. Detail every ability: range, cost, stats used and synergies.

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Grand Design supports one of the core mechanic's key aspect (offerings with position-based HP amount) while also providing a more long-term strategy by copying an existing offering.

8. Balance the character: how do the spells tradeoffs, costs and power evolve over time ? Does the character have enough in terms of strengths and weaknesses ? Are there major counters or synergies with other characters ?

Systems Design

a. Keyworded Mechanics

Clearly defining the mechanics design helped me to deal with the amount of content I was building and keep coherence across the roster while trying new combinations. Those mechanics where broken down into 3 categories:

  1. Action keywords

  2. State keywords

  3. Turn-Taking keywords

Keywords.png

example of some action keywords

Admittedly, breadth took over depth in this project. But clearly differentiating events, traits and passives allowed me to design various mechanics while tinkering with their trigger condition and area of application to still provide variation. To do so, I also separated those mechanics into 3 categories.

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b. General mechanics

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1. Set Events: they are active, random and not chosen by the players.

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2. Race Trait: they are passive, deterministic and not chosen by the players.

3. Class Passives: they are passive, deterministic and chosen by the players among two options (one being easier by having no condition, the other one more strong and risky by having a trigger condition or cost)

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This project was the first where I approached complexity and difficulty in a more structured fashion. I thus used these guidelines (heavily inspired by what I learned during my earlier System Design internship) as a benchmark for every character, while allowing me some freedom when I felt the need. Here are the major ones :

c. Complexity & Balancing

1. Characters Overview : to make sure I would not design my characters in isolation, and that I was exploring as much variations as possible.

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2. Class Median Stats: a very simple balancing technique, that allowed me to define a default template for each class, from which I could raise or lower some stats to emphasise various strengths and weaknesses.

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3. Complexity Guidelines: again, a very simple way to rationalize the difficulty of various characters' gameplay.

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The Final Result

These are just ideas of content, but I hope you will still find some of them interesting to check out.

(click on the image then on "go to link" if you want to see the full concept document. Art credits are also there.)

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