Game : Illuvium Arena
Platform : PC
Job title : Lead game designer
On Illuvium Area I had the task of designing 200+ characters for a high strategy autobattler. The target audience was wide - with demographics stretching from high strategy competitive players, competing for prize money, to a young casual audience more focused on playing with their cute characters. To further complicate matters, the game modes and rules had not yet been designed but a number of characters had. These 15 characters had been created by art teams without a game design background, but which had become popular with the community. As a result I had a design requirement for them to be integrated and be balancable within the wider roster without losing their identities.
A small selections of the characters I worked on
The first task for me was to create a pipeline for character production and to define the design framework in which the characters would fit. The starting point we had was that characters evolve into bigger and more powerful units. This allowed us to keep things cute on the small end, and allow for power fantasies at the higher end. Each character having an simple affinity and a class and them changing into more something more complex as they evolved. Ensuring that the core identity is mutual but that the later evolutions don’t feel like a rehashed character but instead something unique with advantages and disadvantages. I didn’t want later characters to be simply stronger - I wanted higher evolved characters to fulfil different purposes.
3 characters of the same line, showing progression from cute to powerful
This had me initially focused on the fundamental roles in which I wanted characters to be able to fulfil. Support - Damage Dealer - Offtank - Tank but with the sheer number of characters required to be created, and the plan for yearly expansions increasing the number of characters these roles were too basic and broad. So many characters couldn't fit nicely into a single category without becoming overly typical, diminishing their identity and over simplifying gameplay.
I ended up breaking these roles down further into dozens of smaller roles, of which any single character would hold several but at varying levels of power. This resulted in me being able to ensure any single role wasn’t overrepresented and to ensure each character was distinct.
A very early spreadsheet of the character role system.
Character specific design
The Pterodactyl based characters were a design headache, created without design oversight they had been introduced to the community as one of the most powerful characters in the game announcement trailer. But had significant design issues with their abilities.
The Pterodactyl based character line
Rhamphyre in the finished game
Rhamphyre in the initial reveal trailer
Rhamphre render
The pterodactyl line was created and introduced to the community to great excitement, one of my objectives was to turn it into a meaningful character that could fit within the high strategy autobattler. This required it to have a strong gameplay purpose, but also tools by which the opponent could defeat it.
This posed a number of design challenges.
The characters ability took a very long time (9 seconds) and we were targeting each battle to last less than 40 seconds.
The character was introduced as a fighter rogue, but with the iconic ability, it wasn’t behaving like one.
Flying into the sky, caused abilities and attacks targeting the character to look terrible or simply break.
The first step was to change the classes to better match the identity of the character, I moved the character from being a Rogue Fighter, to being a Rogue Mage. This allowed me to focus the power of the character into the special ability over its raw stats and reinforce its identity. A mass AOE attack that players could play into and play around.
The second step was to change the ability animation, cutting out portions and speeding up the animation itself. This took a few iterations to get right, but we ended up managing to bring the ability to just under 3 seconds in duration whilst maintaining the impact and the feeling of power.
Next involved a more complicated system design change. I initially tried making the characters untargetable whilst they were using their ability, but that provided so much utility that in order to balance the character we would have to severely reduce the damage of the ability.
Whilst creating a slippery rogue might seem a fairly common archetype, it wasn’t in the design for this character and didn’t fit the power fantasy that the fans of the character had. In order to address this we created new targeting behaviours and two status effects, Underground and Airborne. Underground characters were unable to be hit and would drop aggression, but would continue to take damage from effects already applied. Airborne characters would force characters without ranged attacks to swap focus and be able to ignore any negative ground based effects whilst they were in the air. These effects ended up becoming iconic parts of our autobattler design and were used throughout gameplay and allowed Rhampy, Rhamphite and Rhamphyre to keep their identity.
End Result
End result was a significant success, the characters remain some of the most iconic in the game and fulfil an important role within gameplay, as counterplay to clustering defensive teams.
Gameplay for them revolves around their powerful ability, and counterplay is focused on preventing them from using it. Players have a number of ways of doing this, via positioning, item use and team composition.
They are squishy rogue characters that lose against most other characters in a 1v1 fight so cannot be used carelessly. But should they be survive long enough to use their ability they can cause huge problems for opponents. Players utilising them, use them late game once their opponents players have committed to a location. Buffing by increasing ability damage and increasing the amount of energy they gain to allow them to activate their ability on massed opponent units allow players to gain incredible value from the unit.
A profile picture of Rhamphyre