Duration
Jan 2024 - May 2025
Platform:
PC
Engine:
Unity
Team Size:
9
Role:
Designer
Genre
Turn based, Strategy
Welcome to BeatTown!
Beat Town is a tactics game where you play as John BeatTown. A wrestler falling out of love with wrestling. He returns to his hometown to find it in disarray. Use your wrestling skills to help the townsfolk. Will you be able to rebuild your hometown? Will you rekindle your love of wrestling? Play to find out.
My Contributions
I joined the team as a designer in January 2024, during development I : ​
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Wrote and maintained team-facing documentation.
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Designed the enemies' AI behavior and obstacles inside scenarios.
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Gathered, analyzed, and interpreted player's feedback from regularly scheduled playtest.
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Refined designs from results of external and internal playtest.
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Created and populated town map.
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Designed the player's available actions and iterated upon using player's feedback.
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Used Excel to create a Marco Design chart
Detailed Description of My Contributions
1. Team Facing Documentation
There was no documentation when I entered the team. I took responsibility for writing and maintaining the design documents. I wrote design briefs for onboarding, communicated with other disciplines, and documented all levels, enemies, and mechanics.
2.Designing Levels and Enemies
Developing the parameters of a Level in BeatTown.
At the beginning of development the artstyle, genre, and concept were established. The game would be based on WWE wrestling but also would have a town section of gameplay.
Aside from previously established elements we weren't sure what gameplay of the levels would look like initially.
It took discussions with the team to come up with the conclusion.
​Our conclusion was: The levels are not only brawls, they are simple tasks solved by wrestling. The end goal of the player is to help the townsfolk using their wrestling moves. Each level is not a wrestling match but have unique scenario and win conditions. These win conditions make the player approach each Level differently. The levels were designed at a high level first and then expanded upon individually.
Level Components: To make designing levels more efficient, I created the below Level format. The intention was to develop levels easier. Anyone in the team could suggest a new level as long as they follow the Level format.
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All levels in BeatTown must have these components. See below with example of a level called Gone Fishing:​
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What is the problem the player is solving?: The fisherman's store will close if he doesn't catch enough fish.
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Who is the player helping?: Fisherman
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Who are you wrestling?: Fish
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What are you doing?: Catching Fish by using wrestling moves.​
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What is the Objective?: Catch 6 Fish.
Design Constraint: The Arena
One of the biggest design constraints in Beat Town was the 5 by 5 Arena. This was done to lower scope by restricting all levels to this 5 by 5 grid.
After we established the basic components of the Level we build a set of player actions around it.
Building Actions
Actions were wrestling moves the player could perform inside the ring. With the win conditions in mind I gave the player necessary actions needed to be completed. Once those actions were accepted by the producer, I mapped out the actions' expected behaviors using grids.
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Creating Actions
When creating actions, I started with the expected behaviors.​​
Example:
Creating Punch
For this example, I will be using the action "Punch" to illustrate how I designed the actions behavior.
Below is a 5 by 5 grid illustrating the range of the move and it's effect. The surrounding green squares illustrates the attacks range. If an enemy is within the range, the player can use this action. An small explanation for the actions effect is to the right.
The action Punch allows the player to deal 1 damage to an opponent on adjacent space to your character.
After the expected behavior was mapped, I determined the stamina cost and actions' damage through playtesting.
What is Stamina?
Every action has a stamina cost. The player has 4 stamina they can use per turn. Once the players stamina has ran out, they can not use any more actions that turn.
Stamina Meter
This UI element conveys the amount of stamina the player has per turn.
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Balancing Actions
In the game proper there are 5 actions. Each actions has a case or situation where it is useful.
Example:
The action Push is used in situations where the player needs to move an enemy to an certain place or away from the player.
Designing the Levels
In summary, after understanding the overall arc of the fight, we built a set of player actions around it. With these actions, the rest of the fight is expanded upon. I created a list the necessary parts required for each level to function.
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Designing the parts of levels
I started with the objective the player was trying to complete.​ The objective is the unique win condition for a level. ​
Fish Objective
The objective is the move
the fish onto the hook.
Electrcian Objective
The objective of this scenario is protect the electrician. While the Electrician repairs the electric panels.
Lumberjack Objective
The objective of "LumberJack" level is to collect 3 Logs in the Pile. By using the players actions.
I created Enemies and obstacles that interfered with the objective. I expanded upon level by asking further clarifying questions.
How do the enemies act? How can the player interact with the enemies? How does the enemy interact with the objective the player is trying to complete? What happens once the enemy is removed from play?
The fish enemy Is part of the objective.
The fish moves around and
attacks if punched by the player.
An stronger fish enemy that will attack the player and other fish. They interfere with player by removing fish from play. As well as lowering the player health.
The "Goon" enemy will attack only the Electrician to prevent the player from completing the objective.
Electrician's are so strong they can punch holes through the arena.
Hole's created by the Electrician. Player's and enemies can fall into it. Requires 1 fatigue to get out.
Example: In the Gone fishing level.
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How do enemies act?
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The fish enemy only attacks the player if attacked first.
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Barracuda would solely attack anyone close.
How can player interact with the enemy?
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The player can push, punch, and swing the enemy. The player can not move through enemies.
How does the enemy interact with the Objective?
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The enemy is the objective. The objective is to catch the fish by pushing them onto the hook. ​
3.Playtesting
With the Level completed, I playtested levels with only members of the team first followed by playtesting with individuals outside the team.
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Before we had a working prototype in the engine, I ran these playtests on paper. These were crucial in gauging the difficulty of the levels, especially numerical values of health and stamina.
I would go into each playtest with an list of questions I would like players to answer.
For example:
Did you feel like you had enough spaces to catch fish? Did you find all actions to be useful while playing? Did you find you had enough stamina to complete the objective? Etc.
I adjusted the design based on the input.​
![Untitled-1 [Recovered].png](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/fb5c7d_3c196d0059d64f1ca2395cc10de9f7ef~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_192,h_183,al_c,lg_1,q_85,enc_avif,quality_auto/Untitled-1%20%5BRecovered%5D.png)
Later in development after the design was locked, I focused on finding bugs and issues. Since BeatTown is a tactics game, it requires a lot hidden information to be communicated to the player.
Example: Players didn't know when their stamina ran out. The player's eyes weren't drawn to the stamina Meter. My solution was to update our UI elements to communicate stamina more effectively.
I worked on improving the UI to help convey more hidden information and added new UI elements with clear but different states.
I adjusted timing on animation to better convey why the player lost.
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I added Tooltips that gave the player more information about their available actions.
4.Created and Populated Map
The Town in this game is a walkable level select screen. It is similar to the map in Super Mario Bros. I determined the placement of different buildings and interactions that were possible on the map. The main purpose of this map was to be a backdrop for the scenarios and a town for the player to explore.
I created the expected play path for the player to engage in the available fights in the game.
Certain cutscenes would play as the player walks through the town.
Dialogue
To give context to the levels and for better transition between them, I worked on writing dialogues that would be triggered when the player interacts with certain NPCs in town and before engaging in fights. ​​​
Dialogue
Interactable Elements
Interactable elements were placed throughout the map.
These were intended to make the town feel more alive and engaging.
In-Engine
Macro Design Chart
Using Excel we created a Macro Design Chart. This chart shows the overall arc of the entire game, the sequence of events, and the intended players' thoughts for each level in the game.