Narrative, Mission, and Game Play Designer
Games: Rage of The Immortals
In the Beginning there was an Idea and Some Sweet Art
Rage of the Immortals started off with an idea something along the lines of: "Let's make an RPG with a Street Fighter feel." We knew that we wanted lots of areas with gorgeous art, tons of places to fight, and a load of different unique characters to meet and play with. A game like this can't just be all numbers and spread sheets though. It needs a little bit more of a soul to it than that!
As the narrative designer on the team, that was my job! One of the first things we started on once we had our documentation all ready was character design.
This is Mirelda, she was the main NPC for the duration of the game.
Mirelda is a the steady planner of the party, always thinking things through and looking out for the other party members.
Notice how mine is max level? It's because I'm pretty awesome at things.
The Forest Grotto was actually one of our late game zones. The party needed to journey through a dark set of woods to get here. The Forest Grotto at first appeared peaceful but it's a game and we all know how long things like that last...
Progression wise this was somewhere around our 60 Day mark.
Well, if it's Going to be a Game there Needs to be Mechanics and Features or Something...
We knew which features we needed right off the bat: Expansive PVE, PVP with weekly tournaments, Training and Fusion to power up the Fighters, awesome looking weekly Epic Bosses to fight, and a delivery vehicle for our narrative in the form of a Mission system.
This is the details screen of our Mission system. Each Mission came with intro and outro dialogue, a slew of Objectives to complete, and some helpful color-coded information text.
What you're seeing is actually an add on feature; we later added Limited Time Epic Quests which were massive three day long Missions with huge prizes.
A shot of our combat featuring a witch doctor, a kung-fu master, a cyborg, death's apprentice, a punk rocker, and a falconer. We were getting pretty creative by the end.
Combat was mostly auto play with player input for special attacks and targetting. Teams fought 3v3 each with up to 3 reserve characters.
Live Operations and Sustained Content Creation
Once the game was launched the next challenge was making sure that we could actually sustain our inflow of content as planned with Epic Bosses, PVP tournaments, Energy Sales, and Expansion Zones. As the narrative designer this became my responsibility as the other designers shifted gears to work on rebalance and post launch features.
A peaceful village on the outskirts of civilization. The party stops here for a brief reprieve before continuing on their harrowing journey.
The Village of Lucus is a late game zone inspired by Secret of Mana.
As you can see we started to run short on Epic Bosses at some point... We could only make so many bad asses in leather jackets with brass knuckles before we finally caved and broke the mold.
This is Alice the Alpaca Tamer, she came alpacking a serious punch. Oh yeah, puns. Those were a thing.
Late Game Features and Major Content Updates
Once we'd stabilized it was time to add some late game features to RotI! We already knew that the first thing that we really needed to add ws guilds/clans/factions whatever you want to call it! We needed some kind of heavier social interaction revolving around team based combat. We also decided that we wanted to have a system for buffing your fighters so we added a Faction Shop that the player could expend loyalty points, earned by being active faction members, to purchase a myriad of buffs. Since I'd streamlined live ops by this point I took over the feature creation of the Faction Shop.
Additionally somewhere around here we decided it was time for the dreaded power creep to really take effect!
Player's earned Loyalty Points by being active in the factions and completing special Missions. They could spend these points to add buffs to their inventory for later use. These buffs ranged from combat modifiers to increased ingame currency generation. Each time a player bought something the Faction kept 10% of whatever they spent. These could be spent by the faction's high officers and faction master to buy faction wide bonuses. This double down on participation had very positive results.
Adding a new top rarity to the game wasn't just a matter of slapping better stats on fighters, we also upped the awesome on the new 'Legendary' fighters considerably. Each of the new Legendaries came with a custom set of particales and animations.