ShellMage

I worked as a solo developer on ShellMage as a mechanical exploration and passion project. I had a vision for a game that allowed dynamic ammo customization so the player could master the system and be able to respond to a variety of situations with different tools. Think Honey Lemon's Purse from Big Hero 6 for example. 

ShellMage's core design revolves around the customizable ammo and enemies that force the player to interact with it.

You can download and try it yourself here: ShellMage

The vision for ShellMage barely changed throughout development, but the design of the mechanics received lots of iteration. I quickly decided the foundations for the game. Five enemy types and Eight ammo components.

 
Each of the enemies was specifically designed to fill a role.

• Basic enemies were the unit standard. Moderately sized and moderately healthy they were suitable for any scenario.

• Shield enemies were the first change to the gameplay formula. They have high health and are often placed in front of weaker units meaning the player either has to focus on them or use armor piercing ammo to handle the protected units

• Unstable enemies are high risk high reward. They deal a lot of damage to the player, but when killed they explode and damage other enemies nearby. The players is able to prioritize damaging them first to take advantage of this.

• Swarmer enemies are the strategic opposite of Shield enemies. They have very low health, but they're small and appear in numbers. The player can attempt to handle them individually, but usage of wide area damage becomes much more effective.

• Captains are the final enemy of ShellMage. Captains are basically boss units and have high health pools and large hitboxes. As the game's difficulty ramps up they start to appear more often, and they cannot be ignored.

The Ammo components were similarly designed to provide interesting choices and decision making when faced with the varied enemy threats.

• High Explosive is the first and most straightforward. It makes the explosion bigger and do more damage. It's best again enemies near each other.

• Armor Piercing was the second component and gave the player a tactical option. It added one enemy pierce to the ammo.

• Fragmentation does as its name suggests and sends out fragments after the round explodes. It does damage over a high area but isn't always reliable.

• Incendiary provides and additional strategic dimension as it ignites any hit targets and deal damage over time. If the player hits multiple enemies with it quickly they can do a lot of damage passively while actively focusing their attention elsewhere.

• Tungsten Core components provides knockback. This is very useful for survivability, but it only occurs on direct hit making it difficult to utilize.

• Railgun Charge components increase the pierce and speed of the projectile allowing for multiple direct hits with incendiary or tungsten cored ammo.

• Nuclear Payload is simply an exciting component that does massive dmage to enemies athe cost of harming the player as well. This gives it limited use but still makes it valuable in desperate scenarios.

• Enhancement is the final component and least well designed. It allows a bonus effect for every other two ammo combo. It provides exciting new mechanics and strategies to the game, but it goes way over the complexity limit and overwhelms the player. If I ever went back I would remove this from the game.

I learned a lot from developing ShellMage. The most important lesson was about limiting complexity when designing.

As mentioned above I not only had 8 different ammo components in the game but an additional 16 or so bonus effects that the play had to learn how to activate and utilize.  The 8 ammo components were pretty reasonable. They had simple effects and I designed progression around unlocking them, showcasing their usefulness, and then freeing the player to make their own choices. The combo effects were nowhere near reasonable. They were unlocked all at the same time, quite difficult to explain, and not all effects were easily visible. Many players would reach the combo effects and immediately disregard them because the effort of learning them exceeds the rewards of a cool strong effect.