“The insects of the Eri’s Forest are acting strange and attacking perfectly healthy trees! As a forest Guardian, you must help Eri protect the Tree’s while figuring out what is causing the insects to act this way! Eri’s Forest takes the tower defence genre, and literally puts a spin on it! The stunning, full 360 degree environments combined with a unique lantern power up system set the stage for a memorable gaming experience.”
Core Responsibilities:
In Eri’s Forest many of the projects systems and design decisions were well established prior to me joining the team, making it essential that I became familiar with the project quickly and understand the the vision that underpinned these foundations. I worked under the design lead, who gave me guidelines for the difficulty progression, enemy introductions, story, and which environments were assigned to each level.
Process:
I started my design process by first experimenting and getting acquainted to their in-house tools, so that when it came down to creating levels, they were up to standard with the pre-existing levels.
Once I had become comfortable with the workflow, I then moved onto creating a game-play experience story for each level that matched up with existing story dialogue and plot. Once these were complete I moved to creating sketches and mock-ups of the path designs that would come together to create a level. Once I was happy with these, I went in and began creating and implementing the levels.
My general work-flow for creating a level went like this -
Create a game-play story within the given guidelines.
Design and iterate on paper sketches for the level paths
Move to creating said paths with the in-house tools.
Design and implement the enemy and wave progression.
Play-test, iterate, tweak the levels until the levels were “complete”.
Originally I was contracted to work on 6-10 new levels, but once I had completed my original work ahead of schedule I was contracted to stay on and help more with the overall game-play level progression and balance. In this time I worked on Enemy balance, Tower balance, “Lantern” balance, and tweaks to pre-existing levels to create a smoother game-play experience throughout the story mode.