Overview
Team Project (30 People)
Released March 2025
Made in Unreal Engine 5
My roles:
Systems designer
Level designer
Dinos TD is a tower-defense game with an emphasis on controlling the battlefield. We've introduced mechanics unique to the genre like: path building, biome placing, and the ability to freely move your Dinos throughout a match.
Being in the tower-defense genre, Dinos TD was a very systems driven game. It gave me the opportunity to specialize as a system’s designer. Much of my time was spent on balancing and running playtests. Dinos TD also had a large team, which allowed me to expand my skills on documentation and collaboration.
Accomplishments
Balanced the game’s towers, enemies, and enemy wave formations. Player feedback indicates that the final product feels balanced.
Created workflows for balancing, which prioritized communication among designers.
Created documentation style guides, which were adopted by the design team.
Collaborated with a UX researcher and an engineer in RITE Testing sessions.
Designed Archy, the “baseline” tower unit.
In collaboration with other designers, created the game design document.
Created one of the first 4 levels in the release build.
Spearheaded the creation of the game’s Steam page, in collaboration with people from all departments.
The Balancing Process
I worked in-engine adjusting the values of dinosaurs, bugs, currencies, and enemy wave formations. Part of my balancing work was done in RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) testing sessions, in collaboration with our UX researcher and an engineer.
Initially, we did our balancing work by holding balancing meetings, in which we agreed on changes and implemented them immediately. We ran into problems using this method, it was very difficult to find time to get together and implement changes. To solve this, I developed a workflow for myself and other systems designers to work independently.
The following is a visual representation of this workflow, as well was excerpts from a balancing summary document that was shared with other designers:
The Results
After many balancing sessions and playtests, we achieved a balanced state. I was very pleased with the survey results from a playtest:
When asked which Dinos players thought to be particularly strong, 7 of the 8 available Dinos were mentioned at least once. The only Dino not mentioned was Anky. When asked which Dinos players thought to be particularly weak, Cera, Manny, and Viktor were each mentioned at least once. -Excerpt from playtest report
This result meant that players found most dinos to be viable, and in some situations some players perceived one dino to be strong while others perceived it to be weak.
Designing Archy (The Archaeopteryx)
Design Philosophy
At the start of development, each designer was assigned a dinosaur (the game’s tower units) to design. I chose the Archaeopteryx (Archy) tower. The basic concept for Archy was already established: It was to be the most “basic” tower unit, like the Peashooter of Dinos TD.
As the introductory tower, Archy had to be designed to introduce the core mechanics of dinosaurs as a whole. The design team would use him as a baseline when developing the other dinosaurs. When designing Archy, I established baselines that would be used throughout all aspects of the game.
My goals in designing Archy were to:
Show the value of upgrading towers
Show the effect of stats like “attack” and “speed”
Show the utility of the “Crown Upgrade” mechanic
Design Process
To start, I thought about Archy’s stats in relation to the game's other elements. For example, I designed his level 1 stats as:
At level 1, one Archy should be able to fend off a steady stream of basic enemies. One Archy should allow the player to survive the first wave of enemies in the first level.
One of my design goals was for Archy to teach the player the utility of upgrading towers. I was very conscious of how I scaled Archy’s stats when it upgraded. Each upgrade was designed with the goal of showing the utility of a certain stat.
Archy’s upgrades were designed to reflect the difficulty ramp of an average level. It would be marginally more powerful in the earlier levels, but it had enough of a difference to be noticeable with weak enemies. Its upgrades scaled exponentially, so Archy would always be relevant as the wave difficulty progressed.
The Crown Upgrade
Each dino has a “Crown Upgrade” as its final upgrade, giving the dino a completely new move.
My goals with Archy’s Crown Upgrade were to:
Introduce the concept of Crown Upgrades as a whole to the player (again, Archy is the baseline).
Complement Archy as a whole- it has to feel like it is a natural evolution for the dino.
I decided to make Archy’s crown upgrade the ability to create tornadoes wherever it shoots. I did this because it would create a visually distinct and obvious effect. It would be immediately clear to the player that Crown Upgrades change dinos in fun and dynamic ways. Gameplay-wise, the tornado makes up for Archy’s main weakness: his lack of speed. The tornado would make up for this by being a multi-hit attack that hits a lot of enemies at once.
Documentation
When I created the document for Archy, other designers decided to adapt it into a template that they used when designing the game’s other dinos.
I broke the document into a few sections:
TLDR: A baseline overview of the essential information. Primarily for engineers.
Stats and Design Philosophy: A place to go over the philosophy of every upgrade and stat change, so that all designers understand why decisions were made. This was also a good place for design discussions and debates to be had.
Brainstorming: A place for all designers to put their thoughts and ideas down. Prevented the document from getting too cluttered.
Expand to see Archy's full Design Document
Level Design
I also did level design work on Dinos TD. I created one of the four levels available in the release build, Islands in the Stream. My goal was to create a medium to high difficulty level.
I revolved the level around the idea that it would be very restrictive in some places, so players had to be creative with the space they were afforded. Most of the level had a thin land bridge which would use up a lot of the player’s paths. I added thicker sections at each end with biome tiles, opening up options on both ends of the map.
I also included islands, which are disconnected from the main play area. Players are given multiple ways to utilize the islands: they can place long range towers on them to add additional attack power, they can use the biomes on the islands to inflict status effects, or they can add passive money generating towers to the area. Throughout the playtesting process, players have found new and different ways to use the limited space they are afforded.
