Design

Tails of War

Tails of War (known internally as Project Multiply) was my fourth project with WolverineSoft Studio (it was my third project on the design team). It was in development for roughly 6 months and it shipped to Steam in January, 2024 (it’s also available on itch.io).

The game itself is a case study of strategy games in the vein of Advance Wars and Wargroove. It’s a tactics-style game played on a grid where the goal is to eliminate the enemy commander, or to take over their capital city.

As a team, we accomplished the following across departments on the project:

24 weapons, ~21 helmets, and 3 balloon models
6 commander head models
13 building assets
10+ animations – stylized idle & attack animations
100+ 2D assets
50+ audio assets – music, SFX, and voice over
Fully working online multiplayer + single-player mode
Turn-based multiplayer framework
Utility Al framework + 3 tutorial levels
8 unit types – ground/aerial, critical hit conditions, and counter types
3 commander types with unique abilities
3 building types
6 terrain types
16 Unique Artifact buffs
4 unique Key Location buffs

Overview of My Role

I was lead game designer on the project with a multidisciplinary team of over 40 developers. I also created the gameplay design document for the initial prototype. My work also involved designing four maps for the game, various systems/mechanics (how cities are captured, key locations, artifacts of power, terrain, etc.), and new features which would distinguish the game from our case study.

Other aspects of my role as the lead designer included:

Creating the production timeline for the design department
Reviewing applications & hiring designers
Leading junior/associate level designers towards a cohesive vision
Providing guidance & feedback on design work
Establishing design pillars for the team
Making decisions in regards to scope
Communication with studio leadership & producers in regards to the design department

Systems Design

One of my personal goals for the project was to bring a faster pace to matches. The design team generally agreed that playing a match for 30+ minutes in Wargroove only to lose generally felt bad as a player, so we wanted to significantly decrease the length of matches to make our game not only more fun, but also to reduce the pain of players feeling a sense of “wasted time”.

In addition to that, I have a history of playing competitive multiplayer games and I wanted to see if I could bring some of that feel to a tactics-style strategy game. In my experience, not only do tactics games tend to take awhile, but they don’t necessarily guide players with easily identifiable objectives. So, some of the systems I created sought to help not only speed up games, but to provide players with clear goals to gain an advantage over their opponent.

Key Locations and Artifacts of Power

To align with the aforementioned goals, I designed two unique features for the game, Key Locations & Artifacts of Power. Key Locations provided team-wide buffs when captured and Artifacts of Power provided boosts to a single unit.

Part of the frustration of players who are newer to tactics-style strategy games is coming to grips with how to formulate a good strategy and to get better at the game. In Wargroove, capturing buildings is an obvious objective, but beyond that, there’s not a lot of indication of what players should be doing at any given moment to beat their opponent. I personally find this pretty frustrating as not only a player, but as a game designer as well.

So, part of the goal with Key Locations and Artifacts of Power is to bring in elements of other genres (MOBA’s and shooters) into our game to give players a little bit more of an objective on a map to try to gain the upper hand on an opponent. Key Locations do things like boost the damage or defense of an entire team as long as one player controls the location. Artifacts of Power allow a single unit to gain significant advantages above their gold cost, like guaranteed critical hit damage and eliminating the extra movement cost of traversing certain types of terrain.

The reason I chose to go with these ideas was not only to give players a little bit more of a sense of what to go after on a map to try to tilt the match in their favor, but to provide opportunities for both an element of map control with the Key Locations and some situational control in the case of the Artifacts of Power.

One important consideration that was made with both of these features was game balance. It was a large priority of mine to ensure that neither one of these features made a match feel like an auto-loss for the opposing player. While trying to speed up the gameplay, it was important to add features which have this potential, while still maintaining a sense of strategy allowing players to come out on top.

Terrain

Terrain is a big part of games like Wargroove and Advance Wars. It provides extra defense to the unit which occupies it as well as limiting certain units from traversing certain types of terrain. It’s a key part of adding depth to strategy.

One of our goals as a design team was to reduce unnecessary complexity while still maintaining depth, so I decided to design the terrain similarly to Wargroove and Advance Wars. Different types of terrain have different movement costs and defense bonuses. The way the bonuses are calculated can be a little bit complex, so I just decided to implement the way the defense bonuses work exactly like Wargroove does as follows (from the documentation):

Each level of defense adds 10% damage reduction which scales with the remaining amount of unit HP. So, a unit with 100% health receives the full base damage reduction of terrain, but if that unit is at 50% health, they only receive half of the of the base damage reduction bonus, which would be 20% in the case of mountains instead of 40% (15% instead of 30% in forests, 10% instead of 20% in rocky plains, etc.).

Terrain in Advance Wars

Terrain	Movement Cost	Defense	Base Damage Reduction
Roads	1	0	0%
Flatland	1	0	0%
Grasslands	1	1	10%
Rocky Plains	2	2	20%
Forests	2	3	30%
Mountains	3	4	40%

MAP DESIGN

Part of what I designed on Tails of War were the game’s maps. The initial designs mainly started on paper, and then I created them inside of Wargroove for easy testing. After using Wargroove for playtesting and iterating, I transferred them into Unity where they largely stayed fairly close to their original Wargroove versions.

Map 1 (Small and Crazy)

The goal of the first map I designed was to test out how the game played out on a very small map. Since we were looking to make matches quick, a small map felt like a good first step.

While matches ended up being pretty quick, ultimately after playtesting the first iteration of the map, it ended up feeling too small for much strategic depth to form (which was another one of the design pillars). Due to the speed and size of the map, more expensive units didn’t get a chance to spawn and the game ultimately felt akin to a crazy chess match where the board was filled with mostly pawns.

This led me to making the second iteration larger (from 15×15 to 21×21) with more cities for players to capture. Making the map larger allowed a little bit more strategic depth to form. Adding cities to the map provided players with additional income which made spawning more expensive units a more viable option.

After playtesting the second version of the map, I noticed that certain parts of the map felt like they weren’t being utilized and so I tried to rearrange some of the elements on the map to incentivize players to form strategies around the entire map, rather than simply rushing through the middle.

Ultimately, the map ended up feeling much better to play after iterating a few times and it felt like aligned much more closely with the design pillars of the project.

Map 2 (MOBA, 3-Lane)

My goal with Map 2 was to try more of a three-lane style map. I believe this idea originally came from looking at how certain elements from MOBA’s might translate into a tactics game. The idea for key locations came from MOBA’s, so this map sought to take some of the essence and infuse it into matches.

The gameplay style of Map 2 sought to differentiate itself from Map 1 in a few different ways. One goal was to accommodate a more strategic style of play rather than the faster, attack-heavy style of Map 1. Another goal was to provide players with more variety on the map. The thinking was that having the three different lanes meant that players could generally have options for how they preferred to play the map and to create more unique matches based on how each player decided to approach the map.

Ultimately, I think the map ended up falling short of an interesting 3-lane style of play. I would have like to spend more time iterating on the map to find ways of incentivizing players to choose lanes more carefully. I like what I was going for with this design, but I do wish I’d spent more time refining it.

Map 3 (Team Deathmatch, Gears of War )

Map 3 was an experiment where I went with a “team deathmatch” approach the map design. I have a lot of experience playing multiplayer on Gears of War and Halo, so I wanted to see if some of the map layouts translated well to a tactics game. In Gears specifically, almost every single map is symmetrical, so by default they potentially lend themselves well to a tactics games.

I drew up some maps in the shapes of letters to get started and decided to experiment with a ‘Z’ shaped layout as it gave the feel of a “starting spawn” location from Gears and I was super curious to see how this affected gameplay. An attempt to infuse some strategic and risk/reward opportunities came from placing mountains around the outside of the map. The mountains make it incredibly slow and difficult to make it to the opponents home base, but it creates an opportunity for a relatively uncontested assault if players want to throw resources at it.

I think taking inspiration from competitive shooters with symmetrical map design was actually a good choice on my part. Upon reflection, I think the mountains on the outside of the map probably needed to be iterated on to make the routes more enticing for players, but overall, I think Map 3 is interesting.

Map 4 (Quick Games)

At WolverineSoft, we have the opportunity to demo our games to a large number of people at a student showcase during in April and December each year (and occasionally at conventions as well), so ensuring that players have fun with our game in a very short demo setting something we bear in mind. Originally, the game was going to ship with three maps, but after receiving some feedback from a playtester in regards to match-length for brand new players, I decided to add a fourth map to the game.

I had roughly a week to implement the map, so I ended up repurposing an early version of Map 1 specifically so people could enjoy demoing our game in matches that would go very quickly. I think the small map accomplished its purpose as I heard that at the showcase for the game, no one left our demo station in the middle of a match, which to me, was a great sign that we accomplished some of our design goals in making the game more accessible to players who aren’t necessarily hardcore fans of the tactics genre.

Map Implementation

To actually implement the maps in Unity, I used custom tools made by our programmers to create terrain on a grid and then I tweaked an Environment Spawner prefab with various component on it to place all the relevant gameplay elements onto the map.

This workflow ended up making my life really easy as a designer and I think that the programmers did a really fantastic job giving me the tools that I needed to implement the maps as designed in a really efficient way.

The only drawback was needing to be extra careful with the coordinates that I plugged into the map. I basically manually counted squares on a screenshot of my Wargroove maps to ensure that everything was placed correctly in Unity. This simply meant triple checking my work in play mode in Unity, but ultimately, the straightforward tools I used on this project made it a good experience overall.

Leadership

Beyond the design work I did on Tails of War, it was also my first time actually being a solo lead for the design team on the project. This meant that I needed to get comfortable shouldering a lot more responsibility than I was used to at the studio.

I had to do things like: hire & onboard the entire design team (as they were all completely new to the studio), lead meetings, review and provide feedback on design work, create a production timeline, and manage communication between my team and studio leadership.

Initially, a lot of this stuff was fairly intimidating. At the very start of the project, I was under the impression that my role on the team was going to be the same as it was on my previous project with the studio (Cellosseum). After realizing the scope of my new responsibilities, I dove in head first, determined to make the most out of the situation and to grow as a leader.

I think things largely went well for the design team on the project, however, I still feel like I left the project with a few things which I would have like to do differently.

The main thing was how I approached reviewing designs and providing feedback. I would typically check on documentation that was updated on Confluence before our weekly meetings and if I had any specific thoughts or questions, I’d share them with the team during the meetings. While this worked to some extent, it left me feeling like I didn’t understand the game as thoroughly as I would have liked. Going forward, I’m planning on implementing proper design reviews during meetings where the entire design department can share their work more fully with the entire team instead of trying to figure out what’s changed or new in a large sea of documentation.

Another thing that I wish I’d done better was to simply check-in with my team more often. I was working through some pretty serious things in my personal life, so it was hard to engage with the team on a deeper level and I’d like to do a better job of that going forward so that we can make better games and I can create an environment where people are even more comfortable with each other.

Postmortem

Reflecting back on the project and playing the game now, there are a few things that I might change about the way I handled my designs (and a few things that went well!).

Playtesting

The first thing that I would have liked to do differently is simply to playtest the game more. With each project that I’ve shipped as part of a large team, it’s been a challenge to keep up with all of the work, even in the design department alone. After the game finally ships, it tends to leave me feeling like I wish I’d playtested the game more. As game development typically goes, there’s a nearly infinite amount of work that could be done on any given project and those things are easier to see when reflecting on what went well and what didn’t well after the fact.

Piggybacking on wishing that I’d done more playtesting is simply wishing that I’d iterated on the maps I designed more. It’s often difficult to tell if something is fully balanced without extensively testing it in a lot of different situations. I definitely tested and iterated on my maps, but I wish that I would have taken more time to playtest them against more human opponents (rather than AI) to ensure that they worked for a variety of playstyles.

To address these concerns going forward, I’m personally planning on trying to create a culture of frequent playtesting on the design team in hopes that on future projects, we can ship games which are more fun, better balanced, and more polished overall.

Feedback

Another thing that tends to be invaluable for making games is watching people play your game. At WolverineSoft, we host a handful of playtests during development with developers from outside of the studio and these are always useful, but I wish that I’d gone out of my way to gather even more feedback on the game.

Tactics games tend to be deep and have a lot of things going on and it’s easy to take understanding everything in the game as the developer for granted. However, watching people get confused due to a lack of game feedback/UI/polish makes for a much better game in the end.

So, in short, I wish I’d not only done more personal playtesting, but that I also generally just watched more people playtest the game and share their feedback on the experience.

Communication

Another continuous challenge on large teams is communication. While I feel like my own approach to communication seems to be getting better with each project I ship, I still feel like it’s something that I can improve upon.

It seems to me that there’s no such thing as too much communication when it comes to a large team making a game. It often seems like there’s a lot of “he said, she said” in meetings and getting everyone on the same page seems like something that WolverineSoft has continued to look at improving with each project that I’ve been a part of. To address my own communication with my department and the studio as a whole, I’m trying to implement more systems and frameworks in my approach to allow for more thorough communication (both at a studio-wide leadership level and an individual developer level as well). I’m trying to ask better questions and work from outlines for meetings to make sure that everyone is heard and that people know whats actually going on with the project.

Finding The Fun

One of the things that I think went well on the project was actually delivering a fun game. I had theory as a designer that looking to incorporate elements of fast-paced shooters might be interesting and I think that turned out to be fun.

One of the things that can be enjoyable about a modern shooter is relatively short matches which allow players to feel a sense of completion without needing to commit a ton of their time (long games certainly their place, but shorter games simply provide a different kind of experience). I think that idea worked in our favor on Tails of War. With short matches, players are able to wrap their head around the game in a relatively short period of time and to experiment with various strategies much quicker than a normal tactics game. Deathmatch game modes on shooters can be chaotic and fun just by throwing everything you have at the enemy, and that sense of fun seemed to translate to the tactics genre.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, I think Tails of War was an interesting game to design and I’m glad to have learned more about what goes into great tactics games like Wargroove. I’m grateful that I had the chance to experiment with the formula and to try to put my own spin on it. I feel like I learned a lot on this project and I’m happy to have been a part of it.