No Water In Hell
No Water In Hell is about a firefighter stuck in hell trying to get out. Pass through all nine layers of hell to escape
Role: Senior Game Designer
Team Size: 9
Timeline: March 2020 - Current
Tools: Unity, Adobe Suite, Excel, Github, C#, Trello
Trailer
Contributions
Level Design- Creating the design for multiple levels and boss rooms. Testing and iterating to avoid pitfalls. Designed layouts to encourage players to “train” enemies. Ensured that each room layout met our design goal. Collaborated with other disciplines (art, programming, VFX) to build up a theme for each room.
Enemy Design - Designed and balanced over 20+ enemies and 9 bosses. Prototyped enemies and bosses with specific behaviours, strength and weaknesses. Worked with programmers, artists and sound designers in order to fully realize enemies.
Game Design - Crafted player experience, loop and game feel. Maintained and created documentation including GDDs, flows, and prototypes. Worked with artists, sound designers, programmers in order to shape the game. Presented design concepts and potential implementation
Economy Design - Designed and Developed the progression system. Balanced item stats and costs to ensure items realize their intended design. Collected data on player statistics in order to make changes to currency usage and currency collection.
Combat Design - Designed and Developed player abilities and weapons. Creating the core combat loop and setting goals for the player. Researched what made combat fun and unique through prototypes and play testing. Determined the intrinsic aspects of the game’s combat and what drives those aspects.
Prototypes - Created rapid prototypes (1-2 weeks or less each) to test out new design ideas and features. Prototypes included player character prototypes, boss prototypes and enemy prototypes, all in unity.
Game Development and Programming(c#) - Develop and created 9 unique bosses, created shop system, player controller, bartender system, UI, and other features.
Process Work - Documents
Working on No Water In Hell I had the privilege of creating a game from scratch with a dedicated team. This included creating the game’s vision and intended experience.
Following is the work that I did to make that happen!
In order to organize the ideas from the team, I created mock-up sheets. This enabled me to collect ideas from other designers in a consistent format. Below are two samples for enemies that are in the game. I created sections for different behaviours and other enemy attributes. These documents anchored our discussions about the game, saving time, formalizing results, and avoiding unnecessary conflicts.
I partnered with another designer to create this enemy distribution chart for our vertical slice. The chart was used as a base for how enemy distribution was structured in the game. For example, elements like weight were essential for determining how much the hose can push an enemy.
The following documents are rough work that would later be formally added into a GDD or some other team document.
Process Work - Reworking Items
After the game’s early releases, I noticed that our game items were not meeting the design goals that I’d set out with the team. For the 0.6 update I took design control and did a rework of how items function in the game.
Here is how I approached it!
I made the decision to add unique items and item sets inside the game in order to give the player more ways to play to their strengths. This gives the player unique or specialized ways to play, reinforcing a sense of progression in the game. As the player goes deeper into hell, they find better items. They see their items get more visually appealing. The Item document was how I approached fixing some flaws with the initial item design. Below I will explain how items were not meshing well and what I did to address it.
In early versions, the game did have a chaotic fun to it. Players enjoyed it, but I noticed that players were finding the game too easy. Players that cleared a floor and obtained as much gold as possible could buy stackable items for little to no downside. Item sets that had downsides were counteracted by other items, leading to an increase in both player stats like damage and health.
The image to the right showcases the issue. It is in a test environment, but showcases what a player looked like if they had multiple items. While it was fun to reach this point, the image was extremely confusing. It made it difficult for the player to track their progress in the game. Item stacking was a big problem aesthetically and mechanically. Needless to say, it needed to be reworked.
Uncommon Items have bigger stat increases than common items. They revolve around encouraging different play styles without introducing new ways of interacting with the game.
Rare
Rare Items introduce new ways of interacting with the game. This is where items start to give players a taste for unique play styles.
Differentiating Item Rarity
When I approached this problem I realized it was critical for the rework to ensure that other designers had a concrete idea of what item rarities meant to players and what role each of them had in the game. The earlier versions had no consistent rules for items, causing confusion when players are trying to plan ahead. The intended experience was for players to aim for certain item sets during a run. When a player completed an item set, they would be rewarded for doing so, and could measure their progress through the game visually and mechanically. I created rules for item rarity, then worked with both the VFX and artists' side to make the difference between these rarities visually apparent to the player. As item rarity increases, items visually animate or have unique visual effects.
Common
Common Items focus on simple stat increases. Collecting all items in a set delivers set bonuses that increase the stats further.
Uncommon
Epic
Epic Items build on rare items to have a more profound impact on new ways of interacting with the game. They allow a player to hone in on a specific play style.
Mythic
Mythic Items drastically alter the player’s mechanics and provide a unique play style, but with heavy downsides. They offer drastic increases to extremes and allow players to fully fulfill or realize a unique way to play.
Documenting and categorizing items helped me visualize the structure of the game. I wanted items to feel meaningful, be unique, and encourage players set goals for how they wanted to play. I focused a lot on play style with items. I took inspiration from games like Hades, where each upgrade got you one step closer to becoming that unstoppable force roaming hell. Set costs give the player the opportunity to plan ahead. Item rarity is distributed over the six total floors, letting players see that they are progressing by finding rarer and rarer items and allowing them to plan how much gold they need to save in order to buy an item. Play testing to find the right balance was an important part of landing on these numbers.
The graph on the right showcases the item distribution per floor. Each floor has one shop with three spots. Each spot has a chance, based on the graph, to spawn in an item of a certain rarity. This is important for players so they get the sense of going deeper and getting rarer items. The graph has two highlighted rows that both have increased chances to spawn in higher rarity items. This is due to them being timed floors rather then regular floors. These timed floors require the player to leave them within a certain amount of time. Reaching the shop is risky so rewarding the player for doing so with a higher chance to spawn rarer items is important for them to feel rewarded.
After releasing 0.6 we have received positive feedback relating to the game’s difficulty and progression relating to items. I noticed more players replaying our game and the average playtime going up. It was rewarding to see my work have a direct and immediate impact on the game’s health. I especially loved seeing players enjoy something I worked on.
Process work - Designing Enemies
When designing the enemies in No Water In Hell, I considered three main trails: uniqueness, tactics and flexibility.
Uniqueness
Uniqueness means avoiding the creation of a mass number of identical enemies in a game. We want each enemy to be able to stand on its own feet and feel different. Standing out visually is important, but if enemies are similar in behaviour, then each floor will be filled with essentially different-looking zombies.
Having unique enemies forces players to play smarter. They must learn how each enemy behaves and adjust their game play.
Tactics
Tactics involve making sure that enemies have a goal in mind. Every enemy in the game deserves to have their moment to shine. Mindless enemies that rush the player have their moments, but in order to add depth to an enemy pool, sometimes an enemy does not have to attack the player to be a threat.
Skeletons, for example, have the ability to go into a bone pile on death. The pile needs to be destroyed, or the skeleton will come back to life. This creates scenarios where players have to circle back to destroy the pile, modifying their route around a room.
The toadman does no damage to the player but threatens the player in a different way. The toadman tries to align itself with the player vertically or horizontally. This behaviour encourages the toadman to try to get in front of where the player is going. Then it spits out slime that slows the player down. This type of behaviour adds more flavour to a certain floor and more depth to combat by changing how the player thinks about managing enemies in a room.
Flexibility
Flexibility is one of the hardest things to achieve, and is the reason why most enemy designs don’t get implemented or released. I want every enemy to be used and have a role in our game. With a team of just 7-10 people, it would be impossible to keep creating enemies constantly, even if they are unique and have interesting tactics. Because of this constraint, my enemies needed to work with each other. Most enemies interact at some point with all other enemies in the game due to the procedural generation of rooms. Because of this, designing enemies requires them to mesh well with other enemy types.
Balancing the amount of chaos in the game is key. I needed to make sure that multiple enemy tactics do not overwhelm the player. Ensuring that each enemy is flexible with other enemies is a key part of creating them.
Take Aways
Developed visual and practical communication skills by creating diagrams, leading in design meetings and providing feedback
Created and led design efforts in key areas of development
Worked with artists, programmers to implement features
Created new systems and features while balancing and improving existing ones
Check out the game!
Charon and more bosses can be found here!
