Shaun Ng
Game | Quest Designer
STRINGS OF FATE
Third-Person | Action-Adventure | 3D
Team Size: 11 | Custom Engine | Duration: 6 Months
About the Game
Strings of Fate is a third-person action game that allows players to use two characters in fast-paced, positioning-focused combat. Play as a fearless puppeteer, who enters a disused theatre in order to clear the name of the once-glorious art of puppetry.
Roles
Lead Designer | Co-Producer
Design
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Conceptualization
For this project, instead of starting out with some mechanics that we thought would be fun, we decided to go the other direction instead and let the fantasy lead the design forward instead. After some discussion, we settled upon a game in which a puppetmaster controls a deadly battle puppet into battle.
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A lot of the game's direction was heavily influenced by extensive research and prior decisions. As the team's previous game was the puzzle-heavy platformer Visage, I decided that the game should be more action-oriented to deviate from that.
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Extensive research was conducted into other third-person action games to help us make design decisions in the game. The two main games were Astral Chain, a triple-A game relatively similar in concept to ours, and Dissidia Final Fantasy, to help us get a rough image on how an action game's feedback and user experience should feel.
Core Combat Loop
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Prototyping and Gyms
From the design considerations above, I knew the game had to find a midpoint between the action-packed Astral Chain and the more cerebral, puzzle-based Visage.
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To be able to find the exact sweet spot between these two experiences, extensive testing and many iterations of the game were rapidly prototyped in Unity.
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Scripting a robust framework which allowed for different control schemes and game-related metrics was very important at the start, and this helped me to iterate quickly and balance these variables quickly and efficiently.
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Iteration
The game went through extensive testing, internally and externally. Sieving through the feedback to understand how the testers felt helped to refine the game's experience greatly.
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As development marched on, the game moved on to the team's custom 3D engine, and the game gradually got more polished, ending in the product that you see today.
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Level Designs
All the designers on the project had a hand in designing one level each for the game. However, as the game changed, the levels had to be as well. Therefore, as lead designer, all tweaks and polish to the levels all fell to me, and if levels had to be fully redesigned due to cut content, I did those as well.
As a game which mainly focused on the player's combat experience rather than a soulful, involved plotline, leading the player forward through the levels had to be more nuanced as there were barely any explicit directions.
As such, the levels were polished with landmarks and lighting contrasts to lead the player further into the depths of the theatre.