Company: Blowfish Studios
Role: Junior Game Developer
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Role: Junior Game Developer
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
PHANTOM GALAXIES is a third person mech shooter where players pilot their own mech, manage their equipment, and navigate through the open world fighting enemies, completing quests, and explore the distant reaches of the galaxy.
I joined while the project was midway through a pivot from a singleplayer game into a multiplayer game, and begun contributing to the project quickly. I wrote new documentation and specs for designs, maintained and updated documentation and balance spreadsheets, and worked in engine to implement designed systems using tools provided by the engineering team.
My work on the project includes defining mech class fantasy and designing abilities, weapon attributes and archetypes, daily and weekly repeatable quests, levelling and gear progression systems, ambient enemy systems, player movement, and control schemes.
Bounties
Bounties are repeatable quests which grant players a variety of rewards that occur at different frequencies (daily and weekly). Bounties were created both to give players a quicker way of gaining experience at a consistent rate and to incentivise players to engage with the game and even particular aspects of the game.
Bounties offered in the game offer a variety of objective types such as killing enemies, mining resources, killing other players, or even completing other bounties. For each of these there are also a number of modifiers that can be placed on top, such as requiring the player to get kills with a missile ability or mining a specific type of resource, to give players a wider variety and encourage engaging with the game in different ways.
Bounties also include a lore entry which the narrative team is able to use in order to give players small snippets of story or worldbuilding as they see fit.
While designing bounties I worked closely with the engineering, narrative, and UI teams in order to create both the ingame bounty terminal and backend tools required to manage them. It was while working alongside the other teams that we found it possible to add multiple modifiers to a single bounty which made it possible to create a larger pool of bounties.
The Bounty Terminal as it appears ingame
Weapon Mechanics
In order to create more challenging gunplay I designed both recoil and weapon spread systems. I worked closely with an engineering strike team in order to implement both of these features and utilise Unreal Engine features such as curves to adjust variables and change how the features function.
Recoil was designed to be configurable in terms of spray pattern and the spray pattern intensity. We created different modifiers for the X and Y values of the curves in order to utilise the same recoil curves across multiple weapons while allowing those weapons to still feel distinct. In addition to this I designed other variables such as recovery speed that we could use to adjust the feeling of recoil.
Weapon spread was designed in order to create another axis for skill in gunplay. Weapon spread was designed with multiple variables on each weapon that we could use to adjust it for each individual weapon and create a different feeling for more unique weapons. I designed variables such as minimum and maximum spread values that the weapon would move between as it fires, decay per shot, recovery rate, and recovery delay in order to give us more control over the system. In addition to this I worked alongside engineering and UI teams in order to tweak the reticules to more accurately reflect weapon spread to the player.
An ingame example of both recoil and weapon spread
Impactful Dodges
I worked on redesigning dodges to feel more impactful and versatile in their use, and to feel less clunky in terms of execution. One of the main shifts in the game was granting players ways to more quickly swap between Ship and Mech forms and I designed a directional dodge that was able to transform based on the player's current form and movement input upon execution of the dodge.
In addition to quick transform I also proposed the inclusion of more variables that myself and other designers could use to quickly tweak dodges to make them feel as good as possible for players to execute. My design requested new variables that allowed us to control more aspects of the dodge including camera adjustments, dodge distances, dodge timing, and invulnerability windows. In addition to engineers I also worked closely with animators to revise existing animations and create brand new animations to cover all the dodges that player's are able to execute.
A diagram I created in order to show the intent for directional dodges to other teams I worked with
An ingame example of the directional dodges and fast transform