Dawn of titans
Senior Designer - Zynga/Natural Motion
September 2016 - November 2017
As of September 13, 2016, I joined the Dawn of Titans team to help shore up their mission designs as well as feature specification writing. I concluded my time with NaturalMotion/Zynga by November, 2017.
Dawn of Titans is a strategic battler set in a high fantasy world with Titans, magic spells, and medieval troops at the player's command. In this game, players need to control and grow a kingdom to build their armies, which leads to raiding other players' kingdoms for precious loot.
Shown in this video to the right is an example of the real-time battles that players can experience. There is real strategy to deploying and ordering the player's troops flank, charge, or stand their ground.
Duties
Mission and PvP design – 9 event missions, 120 PvP maps, retooling of over 200 PvE missions.
Feature specification writing – Placeable Defenses, Weekly Campaign Events.
Identified areas of improvement based on live player data and feedback and created new content.
As senior designer, I provided experience in mobile game design and level design for the already formidable Dawn of Titans team of designers, artists, and programmers. Specifically, as part of the content feature team, my job was to provide gameplay solutions to existing problems, help build better missions, and provide design specs for exciting new content.
Some of the features that I created for Dawn of Titans are as follows:
Ranger Titan Campaign Event - This was a series of 9 progressively more difficult missions that were larger in scale than any other PvE mission in the game. It featured our new Ranger Titan (at the time) and required a full specification design that comprised of a front end system, tutorial, rewards structure, and all new level designs.
Alliance VS Alliance PvP Battles - This required a new set of 64 PvP maps designed to be more difficult for 8 levels of playing fields (with 8 maps each). This provided a lot of variety for players at all player levels during the AvA events and with extensive knowledge about difficulty learned from man play tests and live game analytics,
Placeable Defenses (Garrison maps only)- This is the next evolution in player agency for Dawn of Titans for player's defensive setups. Before, all players could do was select their defensive troops, defensive spells, and Titan. Now, players can choose where to place these troops anywhere on the battlefield. For attackers, this means that each player they attack will have a completely different troop deployment to figure out and attack!
AI and Gameplay Improvements - I was in charge of improving AI behavior with the help of an AI programmer. Troops movement speed, aggro behavior, targeting behavior, and pathing were among the many AI features that were tackled and improved upon.
PvP Map Improvements - 120 maps were overhauled by me to improve their gameplay, adjust for new AI behaviors, and to implement my newly discovered setup schemes. Over many different iterations, I found much better layouts for the defensive troops to give each match a better sense of progression, pace, and appropriate difficulty.
Below is a link to galleries of various in-editor screenshots of the levels I created for Dawn of Titans.
Screenshots of in-editor levels