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- Folie Imperiale -

aFolieImperiale

2 players board wargame set in the dark-fantasy and apocalyptic world of Amarrendia, torn apart by faction's war and swarms of deadly insects

Team :

Role :

6 groups of 10 people each

​

Gameplay Designer, Level Designer

Time :

Sept. 2019 - Jan 2020 (4 months)

Type :

Academia (1st year)

The assets.JPG

Some assets made by our Art team

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The Final Box

Characters Gameplay Design

P1000849.JPG

  • High mobility on land

  • Good flexibility, allowing them to switch beetwen offensive and defensive playstyle

  • Individually powerful

One of the heroes : the Amanitou, made by Lowenn Berthet

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  • Medium mobility on land, high mobility in the air

  • Essentialy offensive playstyle

  • Power scales quickly when close to each other

One of the heroes : the Salpêtrier, by Victor Aufrere

Level Design

Level 1.JPG

The prototype during playtest, with level art by Carmelo Dott

  • The first scenario, designed around zone-control

  • Some zones (in red) can be deactivated to stop the Rinto's progression, but they will do anything to activate them back
  • As the campaign's story goes on, the growing amount of water forces you to change your strategy
  • The overall level's design was heavily inspired from an ancient indonesian game called Surakarta.
Capture d’écran (1084).png

  • The third and final scenario, based around flanking and surrounding

  • As the campaign's story goes on, the fire makes the roof crumble, turning the last phase of the scenario into an open field fight
  • While the first scenario's character placement was giving the advantage to the Rinto for story purposes, this one put both factions on equal ground

The prototype, with level art by Lowen Berthet

The Turquoise Isthmus

Embers of Tu Wata

  • The roofs are at the core of this level's design. Their placement incentivises to take two neighboring roofs and then slowly take control of the central one

Main Problems

Finding the right balance between mechanics and theme

Keeping readability with a non-hexagonal tile layout

  • Our campaign would pit against each other two factions that we spent a lot of time creating from a lore standpoint, so we wanted to have this reflected in their mechanics. But sometimes, this would prove more difficult than we first thought and some ideas would be killed along the way.

  • Our Creative Director challenged us to explore non-hexagonal tile design. This allowed for very organic levels, but at the same time turned out to be a headache to keep readability and consistency.

And their solutions

Prioritizing easy mechanics with cool names over too complex mechanics

Set metrics for tiles readability

  • I am against hiding poorly designed mechanics behind fancy names, but during this project I realised that designing simple mechanics while giving them theme-related names was something different. And this made a big difference.

readability.png
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  • Coming up with clear metrics proved to be bothersome for our tile design, but through subsequent playtests we ended up with a gut feeling for when a specific tile was too streched or weirdly shaped. Designing high-connectivity tiles did thus always come second compared to keeping the level readable.

Would you like to know more ?

Take a look at the full Game Guide (FR) ! I wrote the Campaign story introduction (p.12-13)

Social improvements

  • Learning to work with a mid-sized team while staying autonomous on different tasks

  • Communicating to leads and managers so they can keep a proper view of the project advancement

  • Doing oral presentations of my work

Creative improvements

  • Laying down the core mechanics of the game with the other designers in charge of it

  • Building characters with a gameplay that reflected their lore

  • Coming up with the right solution for level design and balancing issues

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