Death Trash is a post-apocalyptic world where cosmic horrors crave humanity but meet punks with shotguns.
Influences are post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk, science fiction, horror, grotesque scenarios and black humor.
Influences are post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk, science fiction, horror, grotesque scenarios and black humor.
What I learned
- Working on existing game with 100k+ lines of code
- First contact with players from the community
- Working under creative director
- Working with Narrative & Behaviour Trees
My Responsibilities
- Overhaul of existing design
- additional features / content
- Prototyping
- Documentation
System Design Examples
One of the first things I did, when joining the team, was to get an overview of all the systems and how they are interconnected. To do this I made a verb based design flow chart.
After analyzing the early access state of the crafting system, I came up with a concept of improving the overall experience with it, as well as tackling some of the issues.
It was very important to us to keep the system simple and to not bloat up players inventories which keeps them distracted from the game.
Redesign Examples
I analyzed the tutorial level to see whether to improve it or not. For example players could miss the stealth passage, so that part had to be tackled in the solution. But it turned out we wanted to add a better understanding of mouse control options in the process.Note: this was just my analysis and not ready to be presented
These are some of the solutions concepts to improve players' learning of the stealth feature. By adding a door that closes when players entered the vision cone of a camera, not stealthed we could make sure that players had to use this ability in order to proceed.
I had the great opportunity to prove my thesis by applying my framework for non violent mechanics to Death Trash.
We wanted to explore possible ways of non-violent mechanical solutions as an alternative to combat. With my framework I could design a whole new system.... but I cannot say more ;)
Feature Design Examples
To make lockpicking more interesting and not just depend upon a simple number on your character sheet, I suggested to gamify it a little bit. So I designed a little minigame to make it more interesting and rewarding.
The game already featured a couple of melee mods. But since the game features a lot of fire weapons I designed a couple of weapon mods. Here you can see a balancing table I did for the mods. They come in different levels and mainly are meant as a reward and individualisation for players.
