Design Lead
A semi-idle RPG where you play as a humble swordsmith. Craft the perfect sword for randomized adventurers, then see how far your work gets them into a dangerous dungeon.
Unity
3 Person Team
Spring Semester 2022
Released on Steam
The Game
Design Pillars:
Make cool swords
Enough options that you can get creative instead of simply choosing “the best” options
See your work in action
All swords have a unique appearance and show up in the game. An adventurer’s success is determined by your choices
Feel a sense of progress
Early and late game feel different to play because of new options and mechanics
Just a Humble Swordsmith was my first game project in my freshman year at DigiPen Institute of Technology. The original concept came from my love of RPGs and all the tiny systems that make them up.
I wanted to capture the feeling of going into a crafting menu and Making a Cool Sword, one that takes advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of a character.
At the same time, I am fascinated by the role of NPCs in game worlds and wanted to see what it would be like to play not as the brave hero, but as the simple craftsman who makes the adventure possible.
Our team was made up only of designers, so we had to use the skills we had to make a complete game. Most of the sprites and backgrounds were done by our Producer Shawn, with incredible music and sounds by Tech and Content Lead Joe.
My Role
Responsibilities:
Designed the sword components and player-facing combat systems
Wrote flavor text for adventurers, materials, and sword styles
Themed each level, enemy, and material for progression and cohesion
Created pixel art for materials and some enemies and swords in Aseprite
I was the design lead in a group of 3 designers and created the original concept for the game.
As my first experience making a game with a group, it was difficult to divide up the work, especially in a group solely consisting of designers.
The project also taught me the need for prioritization, as we only realized about a third of our ideas. Polish is always more important!
Most of my work was done in spreadsheets of crafting materials, abilities, and flavor text, but I also contributed some of the game’s art.
I also learned pixel art skills in the software Aseprite, which I used to draw the sprites for the crafting materials and a few swords.
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Sword System
A lot of work went into designing a modular system of swords, including balancing as we went based on player feedback. Each sword style was compatible with each material and each adventurer talent, but we tried to balance them all with each other to avoid having some options being strictly better than others.
Base damage, weight, stats, critical hit chance and modifiers, and player HP all had an effect on combat that needed to be impactful as well as noticeable in automatic battles.
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Visual Theming
To convey a sense of progress and make the battles more interesting, we separated the game into several different visually distinct levels with unique monsters. However, we were also given very limited time to develop and needed to keep the total number of unique monsters and sprite art to a minimum.
Unlocking new sword components was also tied to progression, and I tried to make sure there was at least some sort of logic to what you unlocked and when. For example, the "Royal Gold" material is a reward for defeating the King Slime, and represents forging his crown into a sword.
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Game Design Document
Just Some Humble Gamesmiths were a three person team of designers, and this project was developed during our freshman year over a semester. Because of this, we had very little time to move all the way from initial pitches to full release.
As the design lead of the team, I focused on creating and maintaining planning documentation for the game's many different systems and development tasks. Another designer on the team handled task tracking, but I was largely responsible for most of the other planning and ensuring we weren't wasting valuable time and effort.
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Progression Systems
An important part of the game's design was to create a sense of RPG-like progression, in which the adventurers would bring back new and exciting components the player could use to make newer and cooler swords. In addition to the interactions between different materials and sword styles, it was important that we also spread them out in ways that rewarded players making progress.
To do this, we created sections of the dungeon with checkpoints and bosses that would unlock new components in a specific order. To track what resources players would have at any given time and manage difficulty level, I made use of a spreadsheet that encompassed the entire game's progression.
