Lead Game Designer
2024-2025
Malicious Monsters is a Challenging Fast Paced First Person Shooter game where players play as Nate Kane, a 32-year-old office worker who got kidnapped by his grandfather, who leads the “Torn” magician clan in castle Majick. Players must escape the castle, but for that, they’ll need to find the 3 pieces of the master key that opens the main door of the castle.
The castle is filled with monsters, so players will need to defeat them using a variety of weapons that can be purchased with blood coins, a currency that can be obtained by defeating monsters, and that gets multiplied by the current kill streak that the players have. Players are constantly rewarded by keeping their kill streak, which multiplies their coins. Improving their kill streak also rewards players, by giving them upgrades each time they get a new specific kill streak.
This game is the capstone project for the Game Design program I’m currently taking at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario. The game has been in development since September 2024, by a group of 7 people, each one with different roles in the development of the game. I'll be explaining the key moments of the development of this game.
Before starting the development of this game, each student pitched their own game idea to the whole generation of the program, and then we all had to choose which project we wanted to work on, and the teams were created based on our votes.
The idea of Malicious Monsters came from another student. However, more design mas needed aside from the foundation ideas from the game pitch, and that’s when the team chose me as the lead game designer for the project. As a lead game designer, my responsibilities include designing the mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics; making sure that the game is interesting and gun; and leading the team to achieve the creative vision for the game.
Starting The Development
The First Challenge emerges
During the first weeks of development, I read the foundation ideas for the game, which had the core elements of a traditional First Person Shooter where players were supposed to escape a castle. However, there are many First-Person Shooter games out there, so I started to design mechanics and dynamics that aligned with such foundation ideas, but that also were more interesting and exciting so that it could stand out from the rest.
The first version of the game was more focused on being a first-person shooter where you had to defeat some enemies, each one with a different behaviour and way to kill. Also, players used to find free weapons all around the castle, and there were some orbs that gave players some improvements to their stats. The behaviours of the enemies were the key element of the game, since some of them were supposed to be able to trap the enemy behind rooms, be able to “communicate” among them to organize themselves to kill the player, etc.
However, the correct coding of such behaviours was going to be extremely challenging, but we decided to move forwards. After we were done with the development of one of the early prototypes, we noticed what we were fearing from the beginning, the enemies were not working properly, and the game was extremely boring and uninteresting to play.
Thereafter, I communicated my concerns to the team after realizing that we had 2 options. The first one was that more people of the team would have to actively help the person in charge of the coding of the enemies in order to “see” if we could improve them significantly to achieve what was in the design and to maintain that as the key element of the game. The second one, which I thought was the ideal one, was to add 2 more game mechanics to make the game more fun, even if the enemies don’t have complex behaviours. The team agreed that the second option was the best one for the game, but that affected the planning we had for the development. Thus, I designed, developed, and implemented the new mechanics, so that the rest of the team could keep their focus on the remaining tasks that were needed.
I had many different ideas to add as new game mechanics, but I also had to consider the time we had left, since the first prototype was the first quarter of the time we had for the development. After iterating and analyzing interesting mechanics that could be added to the game quickly, I came up with the idea of the kill streak, and the weapon unlock system.
The Kill Streak Mechanic
A Game Changer
The kill streak mechanic involves that players get a random number of coins after killing an enemy (the random range is different on each type of enemy), but killing an enemy activates a 10 second countdown timer. While the timer is active, the kill streak number will increase by 1, each time the player kills an enemy, the player’s coins gets multiplied by that kill streak value and the value of the timer gets back to 10, but if players run out of time, the kill streak gets reset and they lose the coins they got with the kill streak multiplier.
The Cabinet System
A Game Changer
The second new mechanic, the weapon unlock system (also known as the cabinet system), is connected to the kill streak mechanic and the coins from that mechanic. Weapons are now locked in cabinets instead of being available for free around the castle, and players must use their coins and take advantage of the kill streak multiplier to unlock weapons more easily. This makes the game more exciting, and keeps players pressured and active so that they can keep killstreak high.
To design this mechanic, I had to take a lot of the weapon data in order to decide the prices and content of the cabinets.
Additionally, I had to decide where to place the cabinets around the castle. I am constantly changing the values of this mechanic to balance the game.
The purchase system for this mechanic was developed by a programmer in the team. However, I developed the weapon spawn system that is inside the cabinets.
These new mechanics made the game more challenging-arcade experience instead of a more traditional first-person shooter with some additional mechanics. Which makes it more fun to play, even if enemies are not sophisticated.
Since then, the kill streak mechanic has been our key element of the game. It keeps players pressured and active, I felt that making the game more fast-paced would enhance that experience. Consequently, I significantly increased the number of enemies, and the speed of the player and the enemies, making it a more exciting experience.
Having so many game elements involves a fair amount of balancing. For that, I like to keep things organized when I do game balancing; for that, I keep track of the main data points of the game in a google sheet file, where I constantly change the values of the game based on playtesting and percentages to balance the game.
Trap Rooms
Removing a game element to keep game feel
Initially, the game had “trap rooms”, where players get trapped and the only way for them to get out is to reach the other side of the room. However, the rooms were filled with traps, so they had to be careful and think their moves ahead of time. I developed the trap room door system so that the conditions worked correctly based on this design.
However, the slow pace of the trap rooms (being careful and thinking your moves ahead of time) was breaking the pace of the game, which consequently, led to players to ignore these trap rooms. I believe that players also ignored the trap rooms because being forced to complete a trap room meant that players would lose their kill streak. After discussing this situation with the team, the trap rooms were removed from the game.
Removing the traps meant that now we had some empty rooms. I thought on using that space to create cabinet rooms. Rooms with many cabinets, where players won’t be followed by enemies, and players will get complete freedom to get in and out as much as they want so that they can purchase weapons by using their coins.
Writing The Game Lore
Making The Game World Believable
I find lore interesting in games because it allows passionate players to learn more about the games they love. Therefore, one of the things I did during the second phase of development, was write some lore notes and a backstory scene that can be found around the castle. The notes tell the backstory of the game, which lets players know, in the perspective of Nate Kane, what is going on, what is the place he is in, and why he got kidnapped by his grandfather.
Writing backstory elements is hard if you don’t have a general backstory of the game. So, before writing the notes, I wrote the backstory of many other characters and feel the game world better. The person who got the idea of the game only mentioned the protagonist Nate Kane as an office worker and that he got trapped in a castle called castle Majick, but there was nothing else.
Therefore, I wrote the backstory of Nate Kane, but I also wrote everything about his family members, the clan, and the castle. Having a narrative foundation of the characters and the game world resulted in lore notes that are more interesting to players.
I developed and configured the lectern system that get the notes open and closed when the player approaches them and I also implemented the notes that I wrote (the note graphic/paper was created by someone else)
Designing The HUD
Displaying The Information Player's Need
Initially, we had a very basic HUD UI design in the game that showed basic information of the game. Since there are many elements in the game, such as orb abilities, poison effects, weapons, etc. It was crucial to develop a HUD UI Design that is useful for the player.
Therefore, I designed a clean and simple HUD UI design that easily shows all the necessary information of the game when players play the game. I also added an animation in the engine to the current kill streak number so that it reminds the player that a kill streak is active. I designed the HUD UI using FIGMA and then implemented it with placeholder assets in the game engine, those assets got replaced later with sprites created by the game artists of the team.
The layout has been updated and iterated as we progress with the development of the game, always with the mindset of improving the game as much as possible.
Designing the Tutorial
Letting The Player Know What To Do
After completing the third phase of development, we did some playtesting in order to get feedback from players. The main issue I found was that the tutorial that was in the game was not clear enough to let players understand the objective and the elements of the game, since I used implicit design instead of explicit design to teach the mechanics.
However, after the play testing, I realized that implicit tutorials work better in games with simpler mechanics or systems (such as the first super Mario bros), and that games with more mechanics usually teach players using explicit tutorials. Considering the time we had left for the game to be done, I decided to include explicit tutorial screen elements in the tutorial room that we had, instead of creating a new one. Similar to the HUD UI, I developed the new tutorial elements and then I replaced the place holder assets with sprites created by the artists of the team.
Rewarding The Player
Keep The Motivation Going
Another thing I noticed during the play tests but that wasn’t reported by the play testers was that the orbs were not being used, and players were not motivated enough to look for them, mainly because of the fast-paced action of the game. Therefore, I got inspiration from the kill streak mechanic, which motivates players to keep the kill streak going, to design a brand-new way of how orb effects were unlocked.
Orbs used to be locked in some rooms around the castle, and players were supposed to find the keys to open those doors in order to get access to the orbs. So, I decided to remove the orbs from the map, and make it so that the effects of those orbs can be unlocked by achieving a specific killstreak. This way, players get even more motivation to keep their killstreak, and they don’t have to distract themselves from killing enemies and finding the 3 pieces of the master key that are needed to escape the castle. With all these changes, players are being motivated and constantly rewarded by how they play. The more times you play, the better you will get, and you will get rewards from that.
The development of this capstone has been constantly challenging my design skills, which involves taking hard design decisions to enhance the game and player experience as much as possible. Thanks to the experiences I’ve had in the past, were I’ve learned that rewarding player is a crucial element in game design, I’ve been able to improve the game and to make it an interesting experience in situations where the development of the game was being extremely challenging because of the ambitions we had with the complex enemies. In the end, we managed to resolve the challenge we were facing with the enemies, and we have an interesting game to play that constantly motivates and rewards players for their skills.