Walter Marino
Game Designer / Level Designer

 

Time

January 2019 - September 2020

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Pitch

Corruptor is a Top-Down Shooter game where you play the role of Artificial Intelligence with the scope of killing other rogues AI.

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Project Status

Published on Itch.io

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My Tasks:

• Leading a Team of 4 people;

• Design, prototyping and Implementation of all enemies and main Level features;

• Level Design;

• Gameplay Design;

• Enemy & Boss Design;

• Mentoring the junior designer;

• Playtesting and Bug-fixing.

 

Design Process

Initially "Corruptor" was inspired by the hacking minigame of Nier: Automata, where initially I maintained few core elements but ended up crafting a completely different gameplay, changing the project from a linear action/shooter to a Boss Rush top-down shooter since I was alone at the time, as that seemed the best solution in terms of work capacity.​

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All 17 the Bosses currently in the game were designed and implemented from April 2019 to July 2019, helped by another game designer and a programmer. Each week we came up with 3 concepts for a boss fight, I polished the design and implemented them in the game and later the programmer fully implemented them, fixing some minor code-wise errors.

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Later it was just polishing and adding quality-of-life changes to create the final game experience for the project, reiterating through playtests, debugging and reworks. We even completely re-do a couple of bosses due to a change in the design philosophy and in terms of how enjoyable was from a player's perspective.

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It's been a great journey and, after a fully developed and self-published game, I've learned an enormous amount of knowledge that to, from teamworking to coding and designing features with a limited amount of resources.

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What I learned

• Lead a project from early prototype to publishing

• Lead and communicate remotely with colleagues with different skills and roles

• Crafting the overall design of a game

• Design a minimal game, to be completed in one year by "newbie" game devs

• Craft a great variety of Bosses in a strict amount of time, from scratch to full implementation.