Knight Quest

Trailer for Knight Quest, made by me!

Studio: RamStorm Games

Position: Game Designer

Responsibilities:

– Leading and collaborating closely with 2 artists and 1 programmer

– System Design

– Level Design

– Economy & Balance

– Narrative Design

– Localization (Vietnamese, English)

– And so much more!

You can try the game on Android and iOS.

Story

During 2022, my friend and I wanted to create something together outside of work, we didn’t have any artistic skill but neither one of us wanted to use assets on the internet. As a result, I managed to get 2 former colleagues that I used to work with, they are both 2D Artists. I had great chemistry working with them individually, but we never work as a team before. Thus, we decided to make something simple to test our capabilities as a team. That was when I came up with Knight Quest.

Design

The main goals of Knight Quest are: challenging, entertaining and suitable for everyone, even kids. I wanted to implement Match-3 for combat mechanic with some RPG-elements, it’s simple, everyone can play it with minimal instructions.

The game used Candy Crush and Battle Gems (AdventureQuest) as the main inspirations for 2 main reasons:

  1. First. I didn’t want to put the player in a grind fest from typical RPGs where they have grind over and over again just to have better equipment to progress. I wanted to challenge the players with cool and engaging level designs like Candy Crush, with multiple obstacle types that require a lot of planning ahead to overcome.
  2. Next, the game should be funny and entertaining, by using cartoon-ish style with a lot of parodic designs, humourous story and funny dialogues.

After coming up with the direction, everyone on the team liked what I came up with, and we started the project shortly after.

I created a short gameplay document with visual cues to point out all the game rules, obstacle concepts and all possible features that we should have on release.

The most important to mention in a Match-3 game is the Level Design & how we provide the challenges in each level. Mechanically, I think there are 3 main challenges that we can provide the player:

– Space: challenges the player with the constraint of space. Here, space means the board where the player can “act” (match gems to perform action), limiting space means the player has less type of actions to make, or possibly can perform less action per turn. (less space = less combo)

– Time: challenges the player with the constraint of time. It’s a very common type of challenge for all turn-based game in general. Limiting time means the player has less turns to act and might lead to a loss if they can’t get themselves out of that situation.

– Function: in this game, matching 3 or more of the same gems will create an “action” for the player, so a Function challenge will prevent the player from matching, or reducing the effect of a match.

On release, due to the limitation of time and ability, we only managed to create 6 obstacles in total:

– Stone Blocks and Dirt Blocks were the easiest, they are Space challenges that exists just to block the board and limit the amount of moves the player can take. With a limit of a 7×7 board, having less available moves can be really challenging. The difficulty also depends on where the blocks would be placed.

Snapshot of how Dirt Block would affect gems when drops – cropped from GDD

– Shock Grids (previously Poison) and Explosive Kegs act as another type of challenge for the player – Time. Shock Grids chop away a percentage of player max HP every turn, while Explosive Kegs will deal damage to the player if they aren’t destroyed after X turns.

Snapshot of Explosive Kegs in stage
Snapshot of Shock Grids in stage

– Sticky Goo acts as a Function challenge where the player needs to match twice in order to remove the desired gem from the board, which can be problematic in some case. Out of all, this one is the easiest challenge.

Snapshot of Sticky Goo

– Last one is Ice Block, which acts as both a Function challenge and a Space challenge. It requires the player to break the ice if they want to match the gem inside, and also take up space in the board.

Snapshot of Ice Block

Other than coming up with the main mechanics and systems, it’s also my duty to create, manage and work with data for everything in the game. Which I did it using Excel/Google Spreadsheet, then export them as CSV. Below is the data design for Enemies:

For levels, I communicated with our programmer to come up with a system where we index all the gem types and obstacles we have in the game (e.g. 1 = Dirt Block, 2 = Stone Block, 14 = Power Gem, etc.), then I’ll visual them on excel/spreadsheet and import csv files in Unity. We had little time to make everything, so this was definitely not the best approach, however it provided enough visuals (in numberic format) for me to work with.

The levels were handcrafted, I designed and tested them myself to make sure they tie in well with the game current chapter, difficulty and progression.

For example:

  1. If a stage is a boss fight, and that boss is slow, but hit hard, I would complement it by adding Space or Perform challenges.
  2. If a stage has weak mobs but they attack every turn, adding Perform challenges would increase the difficulty of the stage as the player needs more actions to attack the mobs, but when they attack, the mobs usually die within 2-3 hits.

I also created wireframes for the game with basic layouts and UI flow, which you guys can check it here. With this wireframe, everyone in the team could understand everything better. (in term of UI)

Post-Mortem

While Knight Quest is definitely not our best work, I am proud of the team for being able to release the game. It met a lot of our goals and targets – To deliver a final product, to test our capabilities and chemistry as a team and to try self-publishing our game for the first time.

A lot of mistakes and wrong estimations were made, but what I wanted to take note the most was how to maintain and balance the right amount of contents & challenges. Since we originally plan to make 140 levels with 12 different obstacles (meaning the amount of levels between each introduction of obstacle would be reduced and provide better experience) but we couldn’t do lots of them (only 6 were available in the final release), as a leader, I should’ve reduced the amount of levels from 140 to 70 to maintain the nice gap. The lack of obstacles and enemy varieties really make progressing 140 levels become less fun.

Thanks to this project, we are now handling everything way much more efficient.