FADE TO SILENCE
An open-world survival where the player must survive in a wintry landscape overrun by Eldrich Horrors.
DEVELOPMENT OVERVIEW
I joined the team of Fade To Silence during the last few months of its development. Most of my contribution was helping the team with shipping and finalizing the game.
PLAYTESTING AND FEEDBACK
The main bulk of my contribution of Fade To Silence was working closely with lead Game Designer. I mostly created reports to see if the effects of balance change and discussed different concepts and ideas for potential improvements. Another significant bulk of my work was listening and considering suggestions and feedback from the entire Fade To Silence team and reporting and discussing them with the design team.
COMBAT FEEL
Another major thing I worked on was improving the combat feel of the game. For this, I worked closely with the design team. I first analyzed different games on how they create impact. After showing my findings, the design created a system in the game with different parameters that can improve the overall feel of the game these where features such as camera shake, zoom in, etc. It was then my job to fiddle with these parameters to potentially improve the impact of the combat. After some back and forth with the team, our setup got approved.
FRAME DATA CALCULATIONS AND BALANCING
The thing I am most proud of during the development of Fade To Silence was creating a frame datasheet for the main character and certain enemies. There was an issue whereby a specific strategy dominated every encounter with most of the enemies in the game. Because we were so close at release, we needed to fix this issue with minimum possible work. The team discussed different solutions for this problem ranging from new gameplay mechanics to remove, but most seemed too costly. Searching for an answer, I decided to make frame data spreadsheet of the playable characters moves and the enemies. During this, I realized a way on how to fix the issue and suggested it to the team. After prototyping it and testing it got improved, and the strategy was viable anymore.
QA TESTING
Another major chunk of my time with the project was assisting the QA team by updating its bug database. During QA testing, I found different experiences ruining bugs and wrote them out on how to reproduce them. Some bugs were so significant that I had to spend a few weeks helping the development team fixing the bug by continually trying to reproduce it.