Loot em up is a top down pirate themed shoot em up. This is a game I and five of my classmates created as a school project.
In this project I contributed in multiple different parts. The major design decisions were made as a team but I were often vocal with ideas I could personally think off. I were personally in charge of QA and balancing the game! I were also the main designer of the different weapons and their balance included in this game.
For this project I were in charge of the playtesting and quality assurance. I were also working largely on balance together with one other team mate. For this game I were constantly testing everything that got made, no matter if it was progamming, graphics or gameplay related. This made it easy for us to make a finished polished product in the time we had. Me and the other teammate that worked on balance created a document where we noted down all the math of the different weapons and the economics of the game.
When it came to playtests I were personally in charge and came up with the different questions, play test goals and methods we used for the game. This came naturally for me as I had just completed the course "Test-driven Game design" and were currently taking "Test-driven Game Design 2" at the time. Therefor this was nothing I had not done before and I am comfortable with the task.
Since I were constantly testing every part of the game it became easy for me to work on the QA. In the course "Test-driven Game design" we also learnt how to create a test-plan design that helped me alot. I wrote down every single thing that needed to be done and be working for the game, every asset, animation, programmed mechanic, UI element, etc. During the projects development I constantly checked the dokument, added new things or removed things we discarded. This helped me and my team to keep track of what had been done and what needed to be done. It also helped us stay motivated as we were seeing how tasks were getting completed.
Because this was something that I and the team felt was really helpfull, I also created one of these documents specifically for the UI. I wanted to help the graphics keep track of everything that needed to be done. Therefor I went through everything that would be needed for the UI and the Menu/Pause screens. Then I wrote everthing down in a document that the graphics workers in my team could use to see what had been done and what needed to be done.
For this game I were a key part of designing the weapons that the players can unlock. as a team we discussed how we wanted to weapons to be in generall and what themes we thought about having for the weapons. I then took these ideas and themes and came up with multiple weapons where we ended up choosing three of them, the laser, the tesla shotgun and the rocket launcher.
I created a design document where I went into detail on each weapon. I documented what the weapon were, how it were going to be balanced and what playstyle it would invoke in the player. We wanted each weapon to have different playstyles to give the player more choices in how to play. Therefor we have a long range weapon, a short range weapon and a AOE weapon.
When I designed these weapons I thought alot on how to balance them. I researched other games and from there came up with ways of balancing the different weapons.
We balanced the Laser by making it high range and high damage but therefor have a higher cooldown. This makes the weapon
verry rewarding when successfully used.
The Tesla is short range but easy to hit, it deals a lot of damage when close and
hitting all shots but not as much if you only hit one or two of the projectiles. This creates a high risk high reward type of playstyle.
The Rocket Launcher is balanced by its hard to hit projectiles, even though it is hard to hit it deals high damage in a big area.
This makes for a fun gameplay style where people can make multiple boats chase you to then destroy them all with one or two shots.
Credits to the other students that worked on this project: Elias Örn, Brian Barikhan, Bozidar Jankovic, Simon Leijnegard, Alexander Ikäläinen
