Breakdown
Arcane Showdown showcases my skills as a designer, particularly in level design. However, I did have a part in all aspects of design for this project, including balancing the economy, implementing assets, creating narrative descriptions for cards, and documenting design specifications. Below I'll highlight the features I worked on that appeared in the final game.
The 'V' Map
The V map takes the standard Arcane Showdown map and flips it on its head. The standard map features the middle land being the shortest lane, with the side lanes having much more room being farther apart. The lanes can also interact with gaps in the barriers. The V map I designed to have the middle lane be the longest lane and completely isolated from the outer lanes. And then I moved the outer lanes' protective statues closer, thus creating a V shape with the statues. I wanted the middle lane to be the highlight of the map for building up waves of units while having hectic close-up battles in the side lanes.
After some playtests, I ended up moving the side lane statues farther apart to make those sections less frustrating, and swapped the statue and beacon placements in the middle lane to make the beacons more vulnerable to attack, as they were very easy to defend before.
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The result was a drastic shift in pacing during battle. With two close lanes, the player is much more open to devastating attacks on their statues. And the middle lane is now its own battle for territory. This is one of my maps that people had the most fun on!
Citadel Rewards
The Citadel Rewards are a series of rewards (e.g. cards, gold, gems...) along a path that the player progresses through by improving their trophy score. Once a trophy milestone is reached, the player can collect their reward. After we decided we wanted to implement this system, I was tasked with deciding what the rewards would be and when.
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I accomplished this by creating an awesome spreadsheet. Organized by trophy count, I calculated how much money we wanted to give out per "arena", and thus figured out big rewards and smaller rewards that would fit in the budget. I made sure that the order of the cards unlocking made sense (making it fun but not giving epic/legendary cards out too early) and that the trophy cadence for each reward felt right.
Bounty Rewards
The bounties are a series of goals the players must complete to receive a choosable reward. Once we started implementing this system, I was tasked with designing and implementing the goals rewards in the config tool.
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I first came up with a list of potential goal types, then trimmed them down to the best ones. Then I made a spreadsheet to determine what goals and reward options you'd get per arena, while still keeping a budget in mind. The most important thing for this task was to make the reward options all seem equally valuable, especially when mixing rarities. Then after some polishing, I implemented all the goals and rewards in the config tool.
Design Specification Documents
The purpose of a design specification doc (or "design spec") is to outline exactly how you want a design to look in-game, and exactly how you want it to function. The activity log is one of my most in-depth specs, as there are a deceiving amount of interactions on this one page. As the owner of a spec, I was responsible for answering any questions from the devs about its functionality, and communicate to other designers if our specs interacted.
