A Story of War and Alchemy
About
Play as the villain who tells a story about how he defeated the hero. The goal is to craft powerful potions to empower your minions with elemental powers, you need to counter your enemies by mixing and crafting potions with an element that overtakes the their elemental powers. The game is also in Swedish for accessibility reasons.
Project Info
- Role: Gameplay Designer
- Team Size: 9
- Time frame: 2 Weeks
- Engine: Unity
Puzzles
I was responsible for designing three out of six levels puzzles. The player HUD consists of the potion crafting where three potions will be created and after those are crafted the player can drag and drop the potions to assign them for their soldiers. Multiple potions can buff a single soldier as well. The player is also prompted to start the match when three potions are created which means they can be dropped after combat is initiated as well if they so choose. I was also responsible for doing the HUD layout together with one of our artists to make it look simple yet communicative.
The level also buffs units that are affected by the element that is same as the level, for example the water level boosts the stats of units affected by the water element through potions. This goes for the enemies as well. The units also grow bigger the stronger they are for some visual representation of power growth.
When the battle is started the units will move to the middle and start hitting each other automatically at the same rate. All units have base attributes of the three stats but the enemy has a higher stats than the player. The enemies are a little stronger at base to make sure that the player needs to brew potions in order to make a difference in the battle otherwise they could win without assigning any potions.
Potions
I also worked on the potion mixing system. Mixing the ingredients the potion will give the attributes of the element that is dominant or if it has bits of other elements it will be balanced. For example mixing one red and blue will give a potion that grants both attack and defense and will grant a dark element since red and blue are equal. The dark element is neutral against other elements but has more stats. Mixing two red with one green will give a majority of attack damage and a smaller max health increase but it will have the property of the fire element since red is the dominant ingredient.
The player can also choose to only mix one ingredient which will give the full benefit of that color and attributes. This is the same as mixing three of the same ingredients together for flexibility, mixing one red for a potion is equal to mixing three red.
What I Learned
Learned how to design a strategy/puzzle game and it was a fun experience to make the game since I have never made a game like it before. Communication was clear and everyone was friendly. but a major problem was that we did not have the same vision for the game which caused issues since assets would be made which never made it to the game. The game was also too easy which was one issue but we managed to remedy the issue by balancing the enemies and potions.