About The PIT
The PIT was my final project on my Masters Degree. In its simplest form, it was a: Turn-based, RPG, Roguelite. The game focused around a cycle of starting in a hub with NPC’s that would give you quests to achieve when you would “Dive”. Your job as a Diver would be to travel the multiverse and collect rare materials for several corrupt corporations that would pay you just enough to scrape by in this almost post-apocalyptic world.
As you would travel to each small-contained world, you would find more weapons, powers and pick-ups that would make your character stronger. All the while, the enemies would start getting harder and harder too. In true roguelite fashion, it would become a positive feed-back loop competition with your enemies to stay stronger than them.
Levels would be selected on a pool determined by the players “power level”. This was worked by determining the strength of all the gear the player had equipped as well as the strength of their abilities, and would customise the loaded levels by spawning relevent loot and enemies for the player to face.
The game had about 4 months of development time and 3 team members including myself: Gameplay Desginer, Artist and Narrative Designer. The scope was large, but it was a challenge for us to create something we had never done before, and given the time we had I think we managed to hit the nail on the head.
My Role and Responsability
My role in the game was focusing mainly on systems design. We had a base already set up for the grid system, so with that already done my job included developing:
• Level select and progression system
• Ability creation and funtionality
• Level design and Balancing
• AI balancing and functions
• NPC quest and conversation systems
Since I was the only game designer on the team, I had to work quickly and efficiantly with the narrative designer and the artist to createt levels quickly, and to make any functionality that they would need in order to create content
Frequent and constant communication was needed to create the size of the project that we made in 4 months
Level Design
Level design was an interesting challenge for the team. we had two options, either create randomly generated levels in true roguelite style, or to handscraft each one so we can tailer each level to our liking. We went for the latter, having more control over the design of an turn-based strategy game seemed for a healtier outcome for the game.
To keep things interesting and not so predictable, I create some layers of randomness to each level:
• Containers were arranged in different position around the map randomly.
• Enemy would be varied for each time it loaded. There was a pool of about 4 enemy styles that we could pull from.
• Loot was randomised and scaled to the level you were on.
This was ultimately developed to save time, we could reuse some levels every now and then while keeping it relevent and a challenge still to the player
Narrative System Design
From the planning phase, we knew we wanted to have NPC’s that would give quests and develop along side the player as they progressed through the game.
To let this happen, I had to create a system that would give the player quests at specific times that would allow for choices to be made in the levels. For example, the gunsmith would want you to get him a rare source of metal to make a new weapon, or you could ignore that request and sell it to a corporation to make a large amount of money, but this would change the future dialog to the gunsmith.
I created the base for this system. The tools for the Narrative designer to create the interactions that he wants as well as letting them create specific scriptable events within it, to have full creative control.
NPC’s were static in nature, you would always find them in the hub zone at the start of each run, of course some story elements would change this from time to time but it helped push along the narrative that these people needed you to help them survive this post-apocalyptic nature.
A look at the Pre-Alpha gameplay
This footage is a really rough pre-alpha footage where we were testing an update to pathfinding and ability targeting. Although, it still shows off the main heart of the gameplay loop.
Thomas Simpson - Game Designer 