Project: Reaper

Platform: PC (WebGL)

Engine: Unity

Team Size: 9

Project Duration: 10 Weeks (1 week preproduction)

Playtime: 10 minutes

Build: itch.io (Gamepad Input Only)

Game designer

Designed and implemented heroes and enemies around the pillar "Controlled Chaos", focusing on information clarity

Additional Responsibilities

Team Lead/Producer

Organized standups, maintained Google Drive/Trello

UI Designer

Wireframed and implemented all UI, including character select, dialogue, menus, and in-game HUD

Postmortem

Diversity from the Get-Go

Diversity was the core pillar, in ways more than one. The entire project was based on the depictions of death in Hades, more specifically the Thanatos sections where Zagreus and Thanatos compete to defeat more enemies than the other.

I wanted to break the stereotype of death as the hooded skeletal male figure with a giant scythe; to this effect, the team and I specifically chose psychopomps and gods of death from South America, Asia/Pacific Islands, and MENA.

This pillar was also important from a design standpoint, as I wanted to strive as further as I possibly could from the gameplay of Hades. Each hero was assigned specific roles, with their iterations following those roles as core pillars.

We tried our best to include as much diversity as possible in every venue, including race, cultural background, gender, body type, age, etc. These sometimes meant that we had to make conscious decisions to "spice things up"- like making Morrigan, an Irish god, into an old Black battlemistress.

Iteration: Morrigan

Version 1: Global AOE Buff

Having no chance to miss her AOE and just being a simple DPS buff makes her one-note and boring.
Why would anyone want less range in a horde action game? Wouldn't piercing thrusts be a nerf ?
Doom as a mechanic overall feels out of touch with her

Version 2: (Less) Doom

Doom circles involve a lot of tech work that we don't have time for
UX issue- wouldn't it be overwhelming to have 25 circles stacked on top of one another? Would there be any way to make that feel and look better?
What would a battle mistress thematic entail? Is the offensive support/enchanter the fantasy that we want to pursue further?

Final Version: Battle Mistress

Now an attack speed-based brawler instead of support- but is this better than the original plan? We might have took the easy way out instead of pondering on ways to better deliver the offensive support/"Bloodlust" fantasy
Anti-synergy between narrow attack hitbox and ramping attack speed system- not enough feedback to feel each thrust being meaningful

Conclusion

I was nervous approaching this project as it was my first time in a while leading a team. Thanks to my amazing team, however, we were able to make the most out of this project.

+Incredibly humbling experience as a team lead- respecting people's time and aiming for better work, not more work, is important in making a good game.

+Learned a lot about rapid prototyping and iteration- more and earlier iteration means more time implementing & playtesting.

-I couldn't help as much as I liked with mechanics implementation.

-Some mechanics had to be simplified; though we managed to keep their core identities intact, I wish I could experiment with more complex interactions.

The initial level design diagram was based on a "battle royale" idea of a shrinking playspace; we quickly realized that this would severely clash with the hack-n-slash design, so it was scrapped.