The Project
The Winding Wilds is a small tabletop game prototype where you play a mechanical knight fighting against other mechanical baddies. You equip abilities to use against increasingly challenging encounters. In between encounters you can purchase new abilities from the shop or upgrade your current abilities and stats using Cogs.
What I Did
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Prototyped and analyzed various combat systems.
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Designed 15 abilities and 20 ability upgrades.
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Developed enemy encounters of increasing difficulty.
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Conducted cost-curve analysis and developed balance patches based on the results.
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Created assets for Tabletop Simulator implementation.
Systems Design
The main aspect of the system is the abilities. I wanted each ability to feel unique and have a purpose. However, with the limited amount of interactions in the combat system, that was challenging. I was able to counteract this by adding ability upgrades. By giving similar abilities different sets of upgrades, I could give them unique uses and utility. For example, the Triple Threat and Rotating Slash abilities have similar effects, targeting multiple enemies for modest amounts of damage. However, their upgrades are what set them apart: I gave Triple Threat upgrades that make it a more consistent chip damager, while Rotating Slash got upgrades that allows it to hit all enemies in an encounter to make it the ultimate multi-target ability. Similar uses initially, but they diversify as you upgrade them.
After a first pass at designing the abilities, I revisited them and wanted to perform a more thorough analysis on their balance. So, I performed a cost curve analysis on all the abilities. I started with Key Strike, Piercing Blow, and Overhead Swing as a baseline, assigning a "design point" value to each important stat that I could compare to every other ability.
As I expected, the abilities were badly unbalanced. Most of them seemed to be overpowered, providing much more benefit against the cost. So, I made small edits to the abilities to bring the cost-curve in line (as seen in the spreadsheet below, cost increases are highlighted red and decreases in green, benefit increases highlighted in green and decreases in red). I made a trend of abilities being slightly underpowered in their initial form before increasing to slightly overpowered when upgrades, to increase the feeling of advancement and progression. I also left 3 abilities overpowered above the rest: Sword of Damocles, Shield of Vitality, and Execute (Reckless Charge is a unique case where its utility is dependent on external factors that are difficult to portray in this analysis). These are promoted in the game as "legendary" abilities. While they have powerful effects, I gave them high gold and Wind-Up costs to offset this. Additionally, they can't be upgrades. These abilites, while meant to be rare and expensive, are also meant to feel powerful, which is why they sit higher above the rest of the abilities in the curve.
