Nameless Darkness

Download Game Here
Game Design Document  
This was the first team based project assigned assigned to us. There are understandably a lot of design decisions that are questionable like the tutorial, balancing and the user interface.

General Responses from Public
As the game is uploaded to gamejolt where we are able to get feedback and responses from the general public from all over the world. The responses were wonderful as people liked the game however this isn't the case for everyone because when we did a public play test with people who aren't familiar with this genre, they aren't so acceptable of it and shy away from it after just 1 to 2 minutes. This here is something to reflect upon and improve for the future of projects that are to come.

Game Concept

Nameless Darkness is a single player 2D hack & slash with army management elements where the player takes control of a hero while managing his army, with the prime goal to destroy the enemy’s castle.

Team composition: 3 Designers, 2 Programmers and 1 Artist
Position in project: Game Designer

Roles and Responsibilities

• Level Design
• Game Balancing
• User Interface Design
• Quality Assurance Testing

Description of Responsibilities

• To ensure that every object or prop in the level has to have a meaningful existence to be in the scene.

• To ensure that the difficulty in the game does not steamroll the player to non-existence.

• To design an easy to use interface for the player to see.

• To continuously test the game, to find bugs and defects in the system and report it to the team for immediate removal.

In Depth Explanation begins here

Level Design
 
This rough sketch was my initial proposal for how the layout of the map was going to be like

• With the player's base and the enemy's base being at the left and right edge of the map.
• There are 2 towers on each side acting as the primary and secondary line of defense.
• These towers have to be destroyed first in order to proceed forward
• Once all of the player/enemy's towers are destroyed.
• The enemy/player can proceed to attacking the main base 

• There is a neutral tower in the center of the map.
• Whoever captures the tower will have it automatically attack the opposition forces.   
• The enemy may attempt to capture the tower to have it aid them instead.
• The design behind this is to give the player incentive to play an aggressive style to maintain dominance over the enemy.

• There are 2 traps on each side to hinder enemy's/player's movement
• I had plan for there to be traps like 
• a mud pit
• Slows movement speed of units that passes through
• spike pit
• Damages units that passes through
• This design did not make it through to the final design of the game as the team felt that the game would take too long to complete and thus the feature was dropped from the game.

Game Balancing
 Balancing Sheet
The idea behind the game balancing was to ensure that the game was challenging but still easy enough to allow people to play the game. Another decision that I tried to make was to have units be advantageous when dealing with other specific units like rock, paper and scissors.

This was what it was supposed to be like:

Warrior → Archer → Mage → Warrior

Warrior

Archer

Mage

  











 

That was what I intended it to be but i failed at balancing the mage in the game. Should the enemy or player have a sizeable amount of mages with an equal amount of high damage absorption units. It could very well turn the tide of the battle very quickly. This was a mistake that was overlooked at the time.

User Interface Design


Label (1)
These here are the units the player are able to summon.

Label (2)
This is the valor resource points which is needed to summon units


Label (3)
The red and green buttons are for the player to control his army, which is either to withdraw his army to regroup or to march to engage the enemy in combat.


Label (4)
These here are the skills of the hero that the player can utilize to decimate their enemies.


Hero Icon
Shows the health as well as the total number of units the player is able to have on the scene at a time.


Green and Red Healthbar
At the center top of the screen; the green is to indicate the player's castle health; the red is to indicate the enemy's castle health.


QA testing
For the testing, I coordinated with one of the programmers to perform testing on the game. I would test and record the bugs found and let him view it, then he would work on it to fix as many bugs as possible.