Dieselpunk

One of my privileges while working on SNIPERPUNK was to design a new playable character, themed after the Dieselpunk aesthetic. We decided early in our concepting that we wanted the character to be a soldier, and to offer a level of complexity and a skill ceiling higher than some of our other characters, with a framework of "tactical" gameplay. Characters in SNIPERPUNK have 2 unique abilities which set them apart from one another, and it was a fulfilling challenge to create simple parts which allow for emergent complexity when put together.

Both of Dieselpunk abilities saw iteration upon their design and implementation based on internal testing, as we refined her gameplay.

Main Ability: The War Blimp

• Original Design: 

  • The original concept for Dieselpunk's War Blimp ability was that she would have a movable turret which would move towards a spot you could designate by using your ability, and it would fire a projectile when you fired your Weapon, which would scale in its damage as rounds progressed.

• Iteration:

  • After testing, we found that we wanted the Blimp to interact with the player's build of Weapons and Items more, and so I reworked the design to instead utilize the same projectiles as the player's Weapon, with all of the modifiers of their passive Items as well. Additionally, the Blimp was made to automatically shoot at the opponent if they were within a sight line, and given a limited ammo capacity, which the player could reload by walking into the same space as it.

  • These design changes encouraged players to be aware of both their own and their Blimp's positioning, and allowed for interesting tactical decisions such as blocking pathways with the threat of the Blimp, or to attempt to corner the opponent by moving in conjunction with it.

Utility Ability: Drill Dive

• Original Design: 

  • The initial design of Dieselpunk's Utility, which serves as a movement tool or dodge on most characters, was that she would pull out a drill and near instantaneously travel to where the player's mouse cursor is located. Because of the high mobility of this ability, we gave it a relatively high amount of anticipation and follow through, but kept the actual travel time quick and snappy.

• Iteration:

  • Ultimately, as we play tested with the War Blimp and added the need to reload it, we found that being able to functionally teleport to the Blimp and then anywhere else on the level was too powerful.

  • To rectify this, I changed the design of the ability to instead make the player travel to the War Blimp's location. This allowed for the design to possess the dual purpose of both a movement tool and an instant reload for your Blimp. Additionally, it successfully encouraged more tactical consideration of the positioning of the player's Blimp.

Elements System

The Elements System was a gameplay addition I was in charge of designing, which allows for unique gameplay interactions between different abilities, weapons, and stage objects. There are 3 Elements, Fire, Ice, & Lightning, and they have special effects when they combine.

The system was a very successful addition to the game, and serves to add an element of chaos which can help level the playing field between players with wildly different builds of randomly acquired items, or give particularly skilled players another weapon to wield against their opponent.

Game Balance

One of the most important actions I took during my time developing SNIPERPUNK, was lead the charge on overhauling the game's balance from the ground up. I was responsible for overseeing and helping to adjust gameplay relevant variables across the board such as:

• Default Player Health & Scaling

• Weapons

  • Damage

  • Fire Rate

  • Bullet Size & Speed

  • Unique Effects

  • Reload Time

• Replacing HP over shields with appropriate values of % based Damage Reduction

• Item Rarity

The driving factor behind the push I made to rebalance the game was that the original default for Player HP was 8. As most weapons did 1 or 2 damage per hit before getting any upgrades, there was a tendency for most weapons and matches to feel similar at the beginning, and for player's HP and / or Damage to wildly snowball out of control, leaving their opponent helpless.

To remedy the problem, I set 100 as the base default of Player Health, and the default weapon damage as 12. This set the baseline as 8 shots to kill, just as it had been before, but the wider range of numeric values for health and damage allowed for finer tuning of each individual Weapon and Item. The many changes we made helped to prevent matches from wildly swinging in favor of one player just because of luck. They also freed up the design space to allow more Weapons to stand out and feel distinct, by possessing more interesting capabilities than simply dealing the most damage as fast as possible.

Level Lighting

A simple but rewarding task I had was to utilize the lighting system our lead programmer had set up in order to revitalize the atmosphere of the game's different levels. 

The theming of the characters associated with each stage was the main inspiration for the hues and brightness I would include in each stage.