Unpublished Title (under NDA)

Unpublished online multiplayer action adventure, developed in Unreal Engine 5. My main responsibility was the design and prototyping of items and character talents using Unreal Engine 5 blueprints and the Gameplay Ability System (GAS).

I also co-designed character abilities and long term progression, assisted in narrative design and writing as well as UI/UX design. Basic setup of localization, assisted in QA and testing.

More on my design work:

The design challenge was to create a build system including all the items players could pick up, as well as abilities and talents. Everything had to be fun on its own, but still have synergies with multiple other items. That means they could not just be stat increases, and also needed a hook for other mechanics to work with.

Additionally, for a roguelite game, there needed to be a certain quantity of items (~100 items, ~ 40 talents per character, ~10-20 consumables), in order for players to have a different experience each run. The distribution of what each item's mechanic centered around also needed to be balanced, meaning for example the amount of items referring to each ability. Introducing a new mechanic with one item/talent/ability also meant either creating more new items in order to create synergies for this, or to adapt existing ones.

The game being multiplayer additionally made a diverse build system all the more challenging as we needed to introduce coop mechanics like trading, which makes it easier for players to get the build they want - but harder to avoid them always getting the same items, as players tend to gravitate towards the known.

It was an exciting project that almost made it to the finish line, but not quite. At the end the core and most content for an Early Access release was done. It was a playable game that was already fun, and it would have needed just more polish and balancing, before unfortunately time ran out.