Step into the role of a Seeker in The Tower, an action-adventure / dungeon-crawler where you harness the power of tarot-styled cards to cast a variety of spells. With strategic card-based combat and a hauntingly beautiful gothic setting, The Tower offers a thrilling blend of mystery, magic, and mayhem.
See the PROCESS
Alpha Level concepting
In the early stages of development, we focused on concepting the individual rooms and level designs for The Tower. This phase involved creating initial layouts and brainstorming key elements such as themes, pacing, and beat sheets. While the levels themselves evolved significantly over time, the overall flow and the beat sheet played a critical role in laying the foundation.
Pacing sheet
Created to visualise the game's overall run length, room/level pacing and difficulty progression. The chart helped us track the flow and duration of encounters and the pacing of the game, ensuring that each section was engaging without players feeling stuck or bored. It also enabled us to reduce scope and time so that the game could be completed within a reasonable timeframe.
Designing the world
I used PureRef to assist both myself and the environment artist in visualizing ideas and the thought process behind designing rooms and levels. This tool in invaluable for showcasing different elements, concepts and sources of inspiration, allowing the team to align on the visual and thematic direction of the game.
Level Development
Throughout the development process, my approach was always to iterate on designs as many times as necessary to find what worked and what didn't, ultimately achieving the best result possible. Some designs like the ones seen here were strong starting points, but still required significant refinement and tweaking to reach the final version.
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Ensuring the level design accommodated for player mechanics in unique and interesting ways
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Custom-made modular assets for a quick iterative process
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Establishing a smooth and linear flow of FTUE elements to keep players engaged
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Balancing the difficulty of each level through enemy placements and variety
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Collaborating with environment artists to find the right balance between size and scale
Alpha
beta
gold
combat & spell management
In addition to doing level design in The Tower, I also helped oversee Combat, Spell management, Ability interactions with both enemy & environment, as well as spell behaviours. This was crucial in ensuring that the team had a clear and concise understanding of how individual spells should function, the overall combat mechanics and spell cooldowns.
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Defining how each spell would function and behave in the game, ensuring that our ideas and thought processes were communicated clearly to both programmers and VFX artists
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Clarifying exactly how we intend for out spells to Interact and behave with both enemies and the environment.
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Contributing to the development of engaging and innovative cooldown and spell management systems, aimed at enhancing tactical combat
THE TEAM
Producer:
Designers:
Programmers:
