State of Chaos
State of Chaos was a Realistic Turn-Based Mobile RPG for Android and Apple devices. It was released in certain territories in the second half of 2018. It received several updates over the course of about 6 months before being shut down. The goal was to take popular concepts from games like Summoner's War and expand them into a mobile for so-called "Core Gamers" and an older audience.
Main Responsibilities
-
Progression Balancing
-
Created a diverse set of needs to compel the player to take part in all game modes
-
-
Combat Design and Balancing
-
Ensured that characters and abilities scale in dynamic ways throughout a player's lifetime
-
-
Monetization Design and Updating
-
Designed the store messaging systems, conversion rates, and bundle systems
-
-
UI Design
-
Created initial layouts for the Manage Soldier feature as well as most other screens
-
Combat Balancing
There were three major issues to contend with as I built the data for State of Chaos's balancing: Stats, Basic Attacks, and Special Abilities.
The stats were the easiest to create, I started by created the function that governed all combat; from that I created l formula that worked with all four of the classes in SoC. All I had to do was tweak some variables for each class and I ended up with stats for 40+ characters and any other that would need to be created in the future. The basic attacks were created in a similar manner. I made a formula that would generate all damage values for all characters then I made a giant grid that displayed the number of attacks needed for every character to kill every other character. This gave me a clear picture of how battles would play out. Finallly, Special Abilities were actually extremely different; we had about 40 different parameters that drove the special abilities and in total there were 108 abilities that needed to be balanced across 13 enhancements. Bottomline, this task took a great deal of testing and the creation of testing algorithms.
Economy/Monetization
The economy for State of Chaos consisted of the costs for all character upgrades which required seperate 'recipes' for each character and the managing of 10+ different currency items. In addition, I managed and organized 4 different gacha systems and an in-game store that used currency earned by taking control of in-game assets. The way I approached this task was to create a flexible system of spreadsheets that read from a single table which defined our 'intentions' for how long it would take a player to progress. When the system came together I reversed this process and used our data to simulate the game's progression under various player cases so that I could double check that the economy was balanced.
The monetization side of things required me to generate real money values for every currency and item in the game. This was done by finding an item that we new we would sell for real money (like energy) and deriving a manner for estimating how much impact a single unit of that item would make on the player's progress in the game. Once I knew how much each item and currency impacted the progression of the user I knew how to set the prices of items in relation to each other. All that was left was to choose a value for one of the items, making sure to keep our prices in line with other games. Following the creation of the economy (the hard part) the easy part was creating the different value packs and sale items like the City Souvenir Bag, which was a big seller.
UX / UI Design
I worked on this game for a long time. For a decent period of time I was the only designer on the project so I ended wearing a lot of hats and working on nearly every piece of the game. Some good examples:
- First Time User Experience
- PVP Mechanic (Base Raids)
- Another PVP Mode (Bounties)
- Persistent World (Districts)
- Territory Control (Depot Raids on the Districts)
For most of the features in State of Chaos I worked with the UI Artist to design the screen's layout. Typically I would start by laying out the information I'd need to show, then I'd create a rough mock up using Google Docs. From there the Artist would use the mock up as a guideline when creating the final art.
The most important screens I designed were the one used for the Manage Soldier feature; the menu players would use to upgrade and customize all their characters. The concept for this screen was to keep the character portraits permanently displayed on the left, this way as the player navigates the the different sub-menus used to upgrade characters they can switch between character easily. That speeds up the process of managing a group of characters.
Other Work
