Tiny Tactics GO!
I was one of the main designers on the game Tiny Tactics GO! (TTG) that I helped to soft launch while working at Dim Sum Games.
I was mainly in charge of many of the systems/feature designs. The denominations and distributions of in-game currencies and items, hero ability design, the ranked system, and so on.
TTG has probably been the biggest game that I’ve worked on as one of the lead designers so far. It’s required me to be much more intentional with my design intent - it’s not enough to think to myself ‘Oh that feels right’, the problems and objectives need to be outlined clearly as well. This helps both my future planning and for the team to be able to understand the documentation better.
There were many things about the game that were either easy to overlook or easy to say that ‘the players would figure it out’ or anything along those lines. I realise now that there’s a difference between that and ‘the players will be able to understand it quickly and easily’. Making a complex game for a hardcore audience is one thing, but it doesn’t mean we get to be lazy with how information is presented.
Designing, Balancing, Prototyping the Heroes
It’s the first time I’ve had the challenge of balancing so many heroes in a game like this. The interactions between them ended up being much more layered than I expected, and the way players used them ended up being different from my intentions.
I soon realised it was going to be impossible to balance things in a way where heroes were always doing what I had intended for them to be doing numerically - so the team and I instead began shifting gears towards heroes that were exciting to play and easy to read. “If players don’t care for the hero - they won’t play it, no matter how balanced they are.” A simple concept that sounds obvious when said aloud, but when I was focused on simply designing heroes in a vacuum, it’s something I had to remind myself multiple times.
Figuring out the intertextuality of the game with regards to how the heroes played with the rune system that I had designed - alongside positioning & timing of when heroes were brought onto the field - was quite a difficult process. There was a lot of trial and error and a very good experience to understand how different systems affect one another in differing ways.
Laying out the information for each hero and comparing them saved me tons of time in the long run
Many hours were spent agonising about what hero covered what kind of role in the game, and whether we had enough of a certain kind of hero
Most of my time was spent on google sheets, making sure the numbers are correct
