When I was freelancing as a game designer I wound up doing a lot of systems design work. One studio in particular contracted me to work on their game loop, progression systems, social systems, crafting system, and their overall economy. The game eventually became Paradigm Found, an idle game centered around building mechs, going on missions, collecting resources / exploring different worlds.

My expertise in more nontraditional social games allowed me to create nuances in what might seem to be a simple game, the economy of this game is actually an interconnected multiplayer system where players can give each other resources, mechs, and etc. to use in quests. This meant I had to approach with the focus on how to maintain and protect player progression in every part of the game. This ALSO meant a lot of work on balancing, and I was tasked to balance over 250+ different items, abilities, fully assembled mechs, and bonuses. In addition, I provided UX screens / flowcharts for the entire game experience to help give much needed direction to the UI art and the engineering teams.

Balancing 250+ Abilities/Mechs

Since there was already some design work done, when I first joined; I first focused on improving on and creating the rubric for balancing the many abilities of the pre-existing mechs, pilots, along with their abilities and upgrades. I consolidated the information across multiple sheets into one sheet as you can see in the screenshot. Once I organized the documents thoroughly, I then balanced the mechs and abilities using simple formulas. The organization I did then allowed me to create ways of testing combinations of mech parts and etc. in the spreadsheet equations to make sure our quests rewarded players who were thoughtful about their mech choices, hopefully creating a meta. This screenshot of two evolved pages is just one example of what I did across the pre-exisiting documentation and the new documentation I created. Development / balancing the larger economy became much easier after this change.

Progression

A huge part of the idle game was progression. I created multiple spreadsheets which charted out exactly how much we should reward the player and their average kinds of time to progress. This then allowed me to work backwards from those target values and create more missions systems which made that process more fun for the player. For instance, I designed a quest system to generate new quests daily, a system of shifting of narrative content on weekly basis, and a range of rewards to all to keep players progressing consistently. To keep the progression pace to what the client wanted I used the crafting materials as a sort of center-weight for the rewards given to players. With the amount of time we wanted to demand of players I was able to design / balance any new progression system around when we wanted players to craft specific things. I even pitched progression systems which would open them up to a more ethical way of monetizing the game, encouraging them to lean into battle passes and achievements to keep players engaged and excited about unlocking the next cool mech.

Prototype

Using all this new information and designed structures I created a prototype of these systems. This prototype helped test the flow of the game, the strength of the game loop, how visible the resource economy needed to be to the player, where crafting fit into all of this, and overall the flow of an idle mission. This prototype deadline also required UX screens and information about how we were going to organize the game. Sadly, the prototype was demanded to be made in a week and thus was not well received due to the client’s unfamiliarity with game development / the game design process. However, after showing the amount of work one designer could do in one week I was given more time to provide better work, more robust answers and more UX screens, as a result the game became more realized. As a result of this more built out work my documents and code served as the backbone of what the rest of the team would later implement, and my prototype was now a center of the development process.

I left the company to focus on work for Adhoc Studio, but they shipped the game later on.