My final project on the Expedition Team, The Catacombs, was designed to be an evergreen dungeoneering experience for hard core players. It uses a procedural dungeon design system design by me in partnership with gameplay engineering and oversaw by the Expedition Team’s lead, Darren Mckinsey.
What I Did:
I designed the initial logic and layout of the procedural dungeon’s game space and designed and implemented the initial version of what would become the mode’s metaprogression systems of perks and level ups.
The Layout:
When setting out to design the Catacomb’s procedural system, we first needed to define the playspace and tile size of each ‘Tile’ in the dungeon’s layout. We decided on using tiles for simplicity’s sake, but we were also very concerned that too much repetition would be detrimental to the player experience. To complicate matters further, we didn’t want to overwork art by creating hundreds of bespoke tiles, so instead we created a system of very simple ‘template’ tiles that could be skinned and remixed with little impact on art or the background logic that put the dungeon together.
The dungeon’s level was then split into a grid with each tile being assigned an entity at its origin that would spawn the tile we wished. If built correctly, this would dramatically reduce the guess work needed for spawning dungeons and would allow us to control the desired approximate location of special tiles, such as the starting tile.
Along the way, I drew and designed multiple references for the artists.
The Perks and Progression:
I was championing the perk systems I’d seen in games like Vampire Survivors and Elden Ring Nightreign when we were initially plotting the mode’s perk and level up system. Initially the dungeon was designed to simply stand on its own without any temporary buffs. The thinking behind this was that we wanted this mode to be aspirational content for players who had already reached max rank. However, while playtesting, we realized that the experience was too flat and started looking towards Nightreign’s own progression system, namely the way players ‘level up’ as they play through a round of that game.
I designed and implemented the initial version of this level up, as well as some basic perks for players to pick up from chests, such as speed and defense buffs. The level up worked through our Status Effects system, which allowed for temporary buffs that could be wiped upon mode completion, and I simply applied a blanket damage, health, and defense buff to the players who managed to interact with and pay the resource cost at a level up shrine. Over time these perks became more diverse and interesting, leading to fun designs such as floating magical turrets the follow the player or super jumping into combat. The final perk design and implementation was split between me and Nix Du, who took over my initial design work when I pivoted to assisting Narrative with their main-story boss fight arenas. Eventually, I made my way back to Catacombs and ushered it across the finish line and into players’ hands.