Nature's Little Mistake is a game that I helped made for a University project. My contribution to the projects are as the game and UI designer, along with being a programmer.
Project Description
Project Type : University project
Duration : 19 June 2023 - Present
Engine : Unity
Language : C#
Roles : Game Designer, UI Designer, Programmer
Other Apps : Figma, Procreate, Photoshop, Illustrator, Excel
My Contributions
Ideating Items & Game Balance
I ideate and created the items that the player played in game with the help of other team members. When designing what items the player can use, i used both a top-down and bottom-up approach, some items are made with fulfilling a specific niche, like a shotgun or sniper, while other are created with a theme in-mind first, such as the antlers.
For balancing the game, I used Microsoft Excel to track all the stats and other values, how they interact with each other and what does what and by how much.
Originally we wanted the players to have more items, and all of them could attack at the same time with a press off a single button. The project lead asked me to figure out a way to do a scaling progression and make it so that the damage from a single item run is just as viable as a multi weapon run. I made this graph using some equations to test what kind of variables we can play with. At the end, for simplicity sake, we reduce the amount of items from 7 down to 6, but only one weapon can shoot at a time.
After we got to showcase our game on the Student Expo in SXSW, we got a lot of feedback. The most prominent one being to simplify and streamline the gameplay. We reduce the amount of items down to just 3 and removing melee items, amongst other things. Currently we are not doing scaling due to time constraints, but we are panning to add that after finishing our studies.