Documentation of core game mechanics: Starting from 0 or requested documentation, I have written most of the documentation that is currently taken into account for the project concerning the Gameplay part. I had to be in full communication with the art and programming departments to adapt to their necessities.
General balancing of all game mechanic: From the tools designed in the documentation and created by the programming team, I have had the task of balancing many of the core mechanics of the game.
Prototyping & implementing important features of the game: In addition to the design tasks, I have been in charge of implementing some features inside the project itself. Also, I have created prototypes for future game mechanics.
QA Testing: And last but not least, one of the tasks I have taken on is to search for bugs in the game and report them in the tool called Jira. The reported bugs have been reported so that the programming or art team is able to easily understand how the bug is reproduced and its rate to appear.
Feedback to other departments: I had to provide feedback to the Interface, Animation, Sound, and Visual Effects departments so they could perfectly adapt to what was needed in the project. This involved meetings, creating diagrams, and looking for references.
Level Creation: One of my main roles during the development of the project was creating levels having into account the game mechanics and making these levels fun for the players. Once a level was approved for the game, my task was to polish and visually decorate and in accordance with the rest of the levels. Later, levels were tested with a real audience, and depending on its feedback, additional adjustments were made or even the level was changed entirely.
Game Flow Balancing: Another task that I had to do was to select the order of the levels. It was not easy, that’s because I had to consider different features such as the theme, the difficulty, the curve of interest of the player. Due to the levels were tested with real players several times, the levels had to be reviewed regularly.
Infinite Mode Module Creation:Tallest Tree has an additional mode where an infinite level is randomly generated with smalls modules of challenges. Some of these modules were made out of sections of levels, whereas other modules were completely original for this mode.
Infinite Mode Balancing: The infinite mode is divided into stages of increasing difficulty, where at each stage modules appear within a range of difficulties according to an appearance percentage. I was in charge of giving the modules a difficulty value and providing a spawn rate to.
Localization to Spanish: All the text of the game were localized to Spanish. The game was not translated literally, the area where the text appears, and the clarity of the message had to be taken account.
Balance wave of enemies: This was without a doubt, one of the tasks I was more invested in during the project. For this task I had to consider different factors so that each combat arena didn’t feel frustrating or boring to the player. Some of the elements I had to balance were the number of waves, the types of enemies, the number of enemies per wave, among others. That way, I had to mold the difficulty curve according to the needs of the project to obtain a good game flow. To ease the process of balancing each combat arena, I had to create an Excel sheet where all the relevant data for each level appears.
Added collisions: When the artists finalized implementing all models within a level, I worked along some other workmates on inserting all level collisions. This process was done manually.
QA testing and feedback: Another set of tasks to which I dedicated a lot of effort were the ones related to QA and design feedback. On one hand, I had to report every bug through the portal Redmine, where I would specify how the bugs could be reproduced so that programmers were able to look at them and fix them. On the other, by trying out different levels and having meetings with the designers, I was able to give them feedback both verbal and written about the overall game design.
Game Design: Before joining the rest of the team, I was the one who had the original conception of the game and made the first prototypes. The entire development team was composed exclusively of designers, so we all contributed to the general design of the game, doing the GDD together. To fulfil the tasks related to other kind of roles, we had to assign ourselves to these different roles depending on what each was capable of. My contributions in the design aspect were the conceptualization of the game, main mechanics, enemies’ behaviour design, player’s abilities design, among other.
Particles and Materials System: One of my major tasks in the project was to develop the feeling of the player being inside a futuristic world. That is why I took care of most of the smokes and mirrors to reach that feeling, elements such as: the appearance of the player, walls, enemies, interactive objects, and others. In addition, I took care of the particle system of all elements of the game, such as when the player shoots or when a bullet hits a wall.
Gameplay programming: My role as a programmer consisted of: programming the movement and abilities of the player, the enemies’ AI, visual elements to give feedback to the player (for example: when the player and the enemy receive damage, shake the camera when the player receives damage, programming of the appearance of particle effects, points obtained when eliminating enemy, etcetera), collision system depending on the color, programming camera system, and programming of some game interfaces( such as the UI of the main menu, level selection screen and gameplay UI).
