Gigantic Rampage Ed. | Mon Portfolio

- Gigantic : Rampage Edition -

Tools used

Confluence

Slack

Unreal 3

The Project

Gigantic : Rampage Edition is the revamped version of 2017's MOBA game by Motiga. Back in the days, it built a strong community around key designs such as a hybrid MOBA/Hero-Shooter gameplay, dynamic fights thanks to its dodge mechanic, mobile "turrets" called Guardians and a unique 3rd person view.

Overview

While my main focus during my first internship on Reus 2 was to hone my skills to design fun gameplay mechanics, one year later I was a bit more confident with those fundamentals and starting to care much more about my creative process as a whole. During my last week at Abstraction, I got asked by the Lead Designer Bart Vossen to design two new champion's concept under the supervision of Senior Designer Mateja Stankovic, which proved a great opportunity to improve in that area.

Though I could not get these champions through the whole process (concept, design, prototype, test, refine, polish) due to lack of time, I learned a great deal during the four and a half days I spent working on them. And from the get go, I was faced with the following challenges :

How to strike the right balance between enough exploratory designs and a final concept in just a week while taking feedback into account ?

How to fill a gap in the current roster while designing champions whose gameplay experience would fit with Gigantic's approach to gameplay ?

How to tell a story through every single part of the champion ?

Champion Gameplay Design

After taking some time to analyse the roster, I came up with a couple of rough ideas about champions I felt would be a nice addition - each for their own reasons - and reached out to the senior designer for some feedback.

a. Early Ideation

Because of my previous personal project (see "Life & Death" character), I was very willing to tackle linking as a core mechanic again. This was a champion idea revolving around it.

100% shamelessly inspired by Kraven, this champion idea had the kind of gameplay I had never tackled myself, and was not present in the roster. But for good reasons, as Mateja later told me its fantasy was not compatible with Gigantic's gameplay approach.

Playstyle-switching champions have been a favorite of mine since Dofus' Masqueraiders. This idea also had a very strong theming, and doubling down on mobility mechanics.

Another kind of idea I wanted to explore, but at the ideation stage I was already struggling to figure out its core gameplay kit.

Analysing the current roster and coming up with these four concept slides took my around 4 hours, plus 1h of reviews with the senior designer. At the end of the first day, I got the green light to further explore the following concepts : The Empath and The Elementalist.

b. Exploratory Design

At this stage, the goal was to think deeper about the kind of gameplay I could come up with my two archetypes. More specifically for the Empath, because I had an already clear idea of which direction to take for the mage thanks to its detailed theming : a swift dancer, bouncing around the field in a deadly fashion.

Therefore, most of this phase revolved around thinking through 3 different design directions for The Empath :

The Fallen Angel
The Maiden
The Master of Ceremony

Full example of the Fallen Angel variation for The Empath, with some detailing of its gameplay kit. No ability progression at this stage, because the core gameplay was not validated yet

And here are the first page for the two other designs of The Empath :

Each design, including some brainstorming and looking for image references, took around 2 hours. By wednesday afternoon, I was ready to takle the final part of the concepting process.

c. Detailed Concept

For the last part, I will be focusing on The Elementalist (renamed "Salome" in the meantime, while The Empath became Ghibräan in honour of a beloved poet of mine).

Though Salome had a clear direction, there was still a lot to do : some parts of her design were amplified (mobility) while other tuned down to avoid the pitfalls of jack-of-all-trades. Here is the final concept that I ended up with :

On this final concept stage, the work on the first page was mostly about tweaking stats, mechanics and character fantasy. The second page is where I wrote down some design notes following feedback from the senior designer :

As I was already pretty comfortable with writing (I used to do creative writing for roughly ten years), the character bio was quite easy to get right after just a few iterations. An interesting approach, defined by the Narrative Design guidelines of the Game Design Document, stated that every character bio had to be written as if told by the characters themselves, which brought an nice ewriting challenge :

The first version of the final concept was deemed way to shy by the Lead Designer. By this, I mean that the character fantasy was not owned enough by its gameplay mechanics. I was basically selling a shotgun and building a wet firecracker. That is the kind of issue I was struggling with, because breathing life into an idea with concrete mechanics is one of the hard parts of game design.

As an example, here are the first version of the abilities that were lacking some sparks :

Swing and Sway. "Propel yourself up, forward, or back into the air and enter Wind state. At the start of the skill, damage nearby enemies in a radius of 2m for 3s."
Cold Tempo. "Enter Ice state. Gain a Shield for 5 seconds."
Grand Finale. "AOE damage with additional effect based on state. Fire: Weaken the enemies for 3s. Ice: Stun
the enemies for 3s. Wind: You and allies around you in a radius of 5m gain 25% Attack speed for 3s."

In the second version, you can see that the two first examples were improved by either adding a boost to the character or some player-enemy interactions :

The last part of the detailed concept were the character ability upgrades. This proved to be a very challenging task, as every progression had to serve a purpose : a dangerous route for skilled players, a gameplay variation to add some flavour to the character, an intuitive improvement on an existing mechanic, etc.. Each path had a "Designer Notes" section that had to be filled to make sure each path was done with intent.

Finding names for all of the character abilities was also quite the challenge. Not only did it require to find a couple of lexical fields distinct from one another while still following the same fantasy (elemental dancer), but also to find some sense of progression in the names themselves (because calling your starting ability "Destruction of The Ancient Gods" would feel weird). Last but not least, I had to narrow down the names to those that felt like my character.

In the end, I settled down on words such as perfection, passion, extasy or unworthy for tier-2 upgrades and worked my way back to figure out tier-1 names :

Both Salome's and Ghibraan final concept took roughly 7h each, most of it related to detaling the mechanics and ability progression. The phase ended up after the final review with the Lead.

Postmortem

How to strike the right balance between enough exploratory designs and a final concept in just a week while taking feedback into account ?

By trying to break down my design process into multiple phases, from an high-level idea down to a detailed concept, and exploring multiple variations of a same archetype when I felt that I needed to do it. During each review, we were able to identify which part of the design needed fine tuning and which one had enough detailing to be ready for the next phase.

How to fill a gap in the current roster while designing champions whose gameplay experience would fit with Gigantic's approach to gameplay ?

Thoroughly playing and analysing existing champions, comparing them to other Hero-Shooters, talking with designers and browsing through forums about the game helped me find out what was special about Gigantic's approach to champion gameplay. Right from the early concept phase, I made a couple of design mistakes that allowed me to better understand which kind of archetypes would work (the fast-moving Elementalist) and which would not (the slow and strategic Hunter)

How to tell a story through every single part of the champion ?

Everything can be a source of storytelling ! From the name of your champion to its backstory, the choice of core mechanics and abilities names. To start telling a story with all those components, the key is to think about your game experience : how should it feel to play that character ? What emotions should my champion's gameplay trigger inside the player, even without working on the voice acting, animation or visual effects ? This is the kind of questions I tried to answer while designing the detailed concepts of both Ghibräan and Salome.