“Brawlerz Zombies is a fast paced augmented reality action-shooter where you drive, boost, shoot and splat waves of hilarious zombies. Upgrade your vehicles and your weapons and take on the zombie hoards.”
Core Responsibilities:
My role in Brawlerz Zombies revolved around the design and balance of the game-play experience. A majority of this time was devoted to creating interesting and dynamic levels each and every time a player clicked play.
As Brawlerz Zombies is a wave defence game, a level is described in-game as a “wave”. To allow for a dynamic experience, each wave had a few settings that allowed me to define and create the core experience for the game. These settings included things like; how many zombies, which type of zombies, patterns of zombie spawns (North/South/East/West), intervals of spawns, max timer for the wave, and many more.
To create and expand on these systems and tools I worked in tandem with one of the team’s programmers to ensure that a robust enough system could be made which would allow for new ideas to be implemented efficiently.
Process:
One of the primary design goals was to create an engaging game-play experience for both new and existing players. This created two seemingly opposing goals: Balance difficulty to allow for natural progression that teaches through play, whilst continuing to challenge returning players.
Crafting levels in Brawlerz Zombies started with the enemy designs and their interactions together. I started the process of creating levels by first writing down and assigning a difficulty to each individual enemy, and the difficulty level when associated with each other enemy. This gave me a foundation to begin creating and testing the first iteration of the progression for the levels. As the wave progression continued I was able to slowly introduce more and new enemy types to create new dynamics for the player to experience.
To create some variations in the otherwise linear waves, we used a few systems to allow for some ‘designed randomness’ within each new play-through. These systems allowed for modification of variables like enemy spawn patterns, and enemy unit weightings. By adjusting these values I created a “randomness progression” so that early waves are much more consistent, while the later levels vary greatly, giving players new challenges at every turn.
The final phase of this process was constant play-testing, tweaks and iteration on both the wave designs and the enemy designs. The final result yielded roughly 20 linear waves, and 10 “endless” waves which continue until the player was finally overwhelmed and reaches a fail state.
