Dinos TD is a tower-defense game with an emphasis on controlling the battlefield. It features mechanics unique to the genre like: path building, biome placing, and the ability to freely move your Dinos.
Much of my time was spent on Dinos TD was balancing and running playtests. The game 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.
Designed Archy, the “baseline” tower unit.
Collaborated with a UX researcher and an engineer in RITE Testing sessions.
Created documentation style guides for the team.
Established workflows for the balancing process.
Designed levels.
Dressed up as a bug in the game’s launch trailer (don’t look it up)
About
Team Project (30 People)
Released March 2025
Made in Unreal Engine 5
My role: Systems design lead
Game Balance
As systems design lead, I worked in-engine adjusting the stats of tower units, enemies, currencies, and enemy wave formations. Survey results indicated that the end product felt very balanced.
I developed a workflow for myself and other systems designers to maintain communication while being able to work independently:
I imputed the stats into different datatables, and tested out different versions of the balance in RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) testing sessions. During those sessions I would make changes and test them immediately.
Designing Archy (The Archaeopteryx)
I designed the Archaeopteryx (Archy) tower. It was to be the most baseline tower unit, like the Peashooter of Dinos TD. When designing Archy, I established baselines that would be used throughout all other aspects of the game.
Archy’s upgrades scaled exponentially. I wanted the upgrades to be immediately noticeable in the early waves, but become ineffective quickly. The goal was to get the player to constantly upgrade Archy.
