On September 6th 2023, I was recruited as a Gameplay Designer by AtherLabs for Sipher: Odyssey. The project was a top-down Action RPG that features Rogue-like elements for mobile devices.

As a gameplay designer, my main duties include:

• Designing augment (upgrade) contents that align with the overall direction from Lead and Directors
• Creating mentioned contents from start to finish using Unreal Engine 5’s Blueprint
• Some melee combat for Nezumi (we have a dedicated combat designer for base characters, while I’m mainly in charge of upgrade contents)
• Writing and maintaining documents for gameplay mechanics
• Collaborating with multiple departments to deliver contents
• Prototyping new game modes
• Guiding some junior designers

Overall, I spent most of my time between designing contents, scripting in Blueprint, and collaborating with colleagues for gameplay-related issues.

One of the key issues the Augments faced when I first joined was the lack of diverse mechanics and meaningful choice for the players to aim toward.

From data side, since a single equipment type had multiple tiers and rarities, and the augments then only provided flat value, so each tier requires a different augment pool, and within the same tier will need a different pool for each rarity. This made 1 augment mechanic need to be duplicated and modified its value to fit each tier and rarity, which was not ideal for scalability.

My approach for this issue was:

• Decreasing complexity for pool, by removing “Tier” from augment and only focusing on “Rarity” (higher rarity equals stronger and rarer augments), it makes creation process for 1 mechanic becomes much easier, thus allowing us to have more time to create more mechanics for each update.
• A flat-valued augment makes it very hard to balance between augment strength value in correlation with equipment stats. Since augment can’t be leveled up, raw stats provided by equipment can easily overwhelm augment when they are leveled high enough. Turning all augments from a flat bonus into percentage bonus erased such issue, this approach also align with previous point.
• Reducing the amount of meaningless stat-related augments, creating more meaningful mechanics for player to choose from the pool. This added more weight to player choice, and they can synergize more mechanics with the base characters, creating build diversity in the game.

While it took roughly 3 months for all of these works to begin to take off, the update was a hit among players since new mechanics unlock a lot of potentials for player to theorycraft builds, creating goals for the player to grind more.