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Full Mission Gameplay
MightyHeroes_Gameplay_FullMission.mp4Genre: Twin-stick Hero-shooter
Release date: 2021
Platform: Mobile (Android)
Team size : 8 people
My roles: Lead Game Designer.
My tasks :
Combat Design (weapons, game modes, enemies).
Hero Design
Game Balancing
Synopsis:
Mighty Heroes is a twin-stick hero-shooter in which the player must face hordes of enemies with a variety of weapons and heroes in order to save humanity from destruction. Play as operators from different countries with unique skill sets and evolve your weapons to face the alien threat before it's too late!
My tasks:
Lead the Game Design team to establish a strong and fun gameplay loop.
Design an array of different weapons in order to build a rich combat experience.
Design a roster of Heroes with unique abilities and gameplays.
Balance the scaling of weapon and hero upgrades.
Balance the scaling of difficulty.
Define a design system for the UI and on-screen controls.
Game Design Philosophies
When creating Mighty Heroes, my team and I established a number of design guidelines to follow in order to create the game we wanted.
Those guidelines are the following :
Mobile First Approach : Our goal was to create a mobile game that completely adapts to the platform and its capabilities while keeping in mind our constraints such as having all the buttons on the screen.
Scalability : We wanted to have a project that could be scaled later on as a fully fleshed out mobile game and we build every single system accordingly.
Modularity : The game's systems are modules that can be modified individually without compromising or affecting the core gameplay loop directly. This measure was both a safety measure in order to be able to kill features in case we needed to but it also allowed us to work simultaneously on every system without being dependant from each other.
Screenshot gallery
Weapon Design
Four (4) main categories of weapons were defined as the templates for the guns of Mighty Heroes :
Shotgun
Assault Rifle
Submachine Gun
Sniper Rifle
Each category was designed to have an unique gameplay experience and combat loop but still be useful on its own.
We wanted to give the player a wide array of options without creating meta strategies and therefore rendering some weapons suboptimal.
⚠️ All weapons are viable options in combat although the player's gameplay might adapt differently to each one.
Early weapon concepts for each weapon category.
Shotgun
The shotgun's design philosophy was to create an crowd control tool.
It is a high-risk high-reward weapon.
We wanted to entice the player towards a playstyle in which the loop was to create a "train" of enemies and then kill them all at once with one salvo.
Assault Rifle
The assault rifle's design philosophy was to create an all-rounder weapon for beginners that could also work in the later stages of the game.
The assault rifle is the first gun the player uses and therefore it must have a reliable and sturdy gamefeel to it.
Thanks to its range, magazine size and fire rate, the assault rifle is a jack of all trades that gives new players a neutral base from which to discover their playstle.
Submachine Gun
The submachine gun or SMG was made with a "easy to learn, hard to master" philosophy in mind.
Its rapid fire rate and wide spread make it a very cinematic weapon to use but the player quickly realizes that shooting mindlessly will get him nowhere.
The SMG is about choice, timing and resource management.
Sniper Rifle
The sniper rifle is a hard-hitting weapon with a moderate fire rate.
We had to adapt its damage to keep the sniper "one shot, one kill" fantasy alive without it feeling to sluggigsh for a fast-paced shooter like Mighty Heroes while being careful of not making it too overpowered.
The balancing sweet spot was almost making it feel like a slower more potent assault rifle without loosing the gameplay fantasy of being a long distance sharpshooter.
Hero Design
As a Hero-shooter, one of the main appeals of Mighty Heroes is its roster of characters which we had to design keeping in mind multiple design constraints that we established in order to create coherent, fun and interesting heroes.
Our design philosphies were :
A hero must be fun to play on its own, even if the player is shooting at a training dummy, the gameplay of the hero must feel fun and enjoyable to play.
The gameplay of each hero must feel different and unique from the others. We wanted each hero to fill an archetype of character (starter all-rounder, tanky support, highly mechanical dps).
There must be synergies between the weapons, enemies and the hero's skill set. The flow of the combat is the cornerstone of Might Heroes, having a combat that feels like a spontaneous yet organized "choreography" was one of our main goals.
⚠️ As an additional design objective, we wanted to have a variety of heroes from different genders and ethnicities.
The 3 heroes available in the game : Blast, Simo and Sayuri.
Each and every hero has 1 passive ability and 1 active ability.
They can use every single weapon in available in the game and are self-sufficient in combat.
Our 3 heroes are :
Blast : This is the starter character and his role is to give the player a balanced and fun offensive gameplay while also offering survivability with its "heal-on-kill" passive.
Simo : This hero is a combat medic which excels in aggressive play thanks to his active ability which heals him continuously for around 4 seconds.
Sayuri : She is the most mechanically advanced hero of the game. This character is all about speed, movement and mastering the environment to chain kills as fast as the player can.
User Interface
Our main goal while developing Mighty Heroes was to create a mobile-first game experience. We were aiming to create the gameplay and core features around the mobile platform and the UI was no exception.
We created an UI that gave the player full information and control about what is happening during the combat phases of the game but it also had to be a simple and non-obtrusive UI so the player could see the action.
Early UI wireframe mockups :
Here is the research panel about the UI in Mighty Heroes :
Recherches UI.xlsxPage updated
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