Luke Serafin

Gameplay/Systems Designer

Here are some of the games I've designed
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Overview

WARBALL is a game I developed together with some classmates in our final year of highschool. The game was developed using Game Maker Studio 2 over the span of about 8 months with the team coming together once a week to work on it. The team consisted of 5 people originally, but in the end it became a mostly two man job with the main sprite artist and I making the vast majority of the content visible in the final product.

My initial vision for the game was an action-packed shmup-type game where the main objective is to cause as much destruction as possible while fighting off a barrage of enemies. I borrowed a lot of aspects of the gameplay and design philosophy from games like Nuclear Throne and Doom Eternal, then used my own intuition and design thinking to merge the ideas into a cohesive and well rounded experience.

Design Pillars

To meld together all these ideas I needed a good foundation to rely on. To create this foundation I decided on three main design pillars that every mechanic should seek to fulfill in some way. These pillars all work together with the goal of making the combat as fun and exciting as possible and greatly reward skilled play.

● Adaptation
The player should be challenged to quickly adapt their strategy to any given situation and prioritize different aspects of their gameplay in the heat of battle.

● Excitement
The player should be constantly pushed to play at their limit and the most effective playstyles should also be the most fun and exciting.

● Expression
The player should always be incentivized to engage with all the tools at their disposal and express themselves through unique combos and interactions.

Note: The following is a deep dive into my thought process and intentions when designing this game. It is very long and wordy so bear with me.

Weapons

The player’s arsenal is designed to function like a toolbox with each weapon serving its own purpose. Every weapon is designed to have a distinct weakness but be very powerful when everything lines up just right. The arsenal fits together in such a way that each weapon's strength covers another's weakness. This creates a gameplay loop where the player is constantly encouraged to switch weapons to counter whatever situation the game throws at them.

As shown in the graphics, each weapon has a more powerful secondary attack on top of their regular attack. This works as a way to sneakily add more weapons and mechanics without making the game too complicated. Each secondary attack also has a distinct weakness. The shotgun is only effective up close where you can’t react fast enough to avoid incoming damage on top of having a much slower fire rate. This makes the shotgun a quick get-in get-out type weapon as opposed to the more spammy primary attack. The charged laser also has the downside of being slow to charge up and having a very long cooldown period, leaving the player defenseless for a moment.

Enemies

What good are all these cool weapons with nothing to shoot at? Well here they are. The design of each enemy is very simplistic and purposeful to easily understand their role and threat level in a fight. The presence of each enemy calls for a specific response, providing dynamic gameplay and forcing quick thinking and decision making mid firefight.

A Common Pitfall

One thing that often happens in games that have a varied arsenal of weapons is that the players always seem to gravitate to one single weapon that happens to suit their initial playstyle the best. This then leads to a feedback loop of the player getting better at using that weapon, and then refining their playstyle to be even more centered around it. So when they try using a different weapon they get punished for it because they have no practice with the weapon and no way of fitting it into their playstyle. The problem with this is that these games are usually designed around using all the weapons in tandem, so doing that is always going to be the most fun. Not to mention that by only using one weapon the player ends up missing out on a large amount of the mechanics that the designers spent so much time making.

And How I Avoided It

The way I went about preventing players from falling into this boring comfort zone is by making sure each weapon has very defined strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, the enemies and the layout of the levels are designed to exploit those weaknesses. But where one weapon falls short, another shines brightly. This rock-paper-scissors dynamic makes sure that when the player tries to hammer in a nail with their screwdriver because it’s their favorite tool, it ends up not working very well as they will very quickly end up in a situation where that strategy falls flat. But when they properly utilize their entire toolbox and make good decisions on what to use they get rewarded by becoming an unstoppable force of destruction.

More Mechanics

Satisfying combat needs more depth than just “shoot enemy to win”. It requires decision making, risk assessment, and skill expression. I covered decision making in the previous section, but what about risk assessment? I consider managing risk and pushing the limits of what you can and cannot get away with to be one of the cornerstones of satisfying gameplay. The simplest way to accomplish this is with the concept of risk vs reward. Give the player 2 options, one of the options is difficult and risky, and the other is easy and consistent. If the result is the same then players are always going to use the easiest option, even if it’s not as fun. But if you properly reward the player for challenging themselves then it becomes a decision worth making. Combine that reward with some nice feedback and you’ve turned a useless mechanic into your very own dopamine generator. So how does mine look? When the player is about to take damage they get two options: Shift or Space.

The player is forced to decide whether to dash and avoid the danger or to hit the timing window for the parry to return the danger right back to where it came from. Both abilities can be used at any time and both fill similar roles in the player’s arsenal. But the parry is much harder to perform. The forcefield only lasts for about 0.2 seconds so the player needs precise timing to not get hit by whatever they are trying to deflect. In exchange for that risk the player is rewarded with one of the most powerful attacks in the game.

Skill Expression

Skill expression is an important part of making a player feel engaged with the mechanics and create a tangible feeling of progression as they get better at the game. A lot of games create this progression through upgrades that get unlocked throughout the game. But implementing that is a lot of work and is hard to balance so I went with a different approach. Instead of locking mechanics behind progression barriers I lock them behind skill barriers. If a certain trick is too difficult to execute for a new player, then in essence, that trick gets “unlocked” once they get better at the game. Once the player gets good enough they get to express themselves through the use of these advanced tricks and become more powerful as a result.

These extra tricks and interactions let the player add a rocket launcher, Gatling gun, and flamethrower to their arsenal of rock, paper, and scissors, but only if they are up to the task of mastering these more difficult mechanics. This allows for many new ways of approaching a given situation depending on the current skill level of the player. A high level of skill expression also adds plenty of replay value to the game as players can revisit earlier levels with fresh new tricks up their sleeves for even more destruction than last time.

One notable example of these advanced mechanics that I’m extra proud of is what I like to call the grenade snipe. If the player shoots out a grenade, instead of detonating it they can choose to shoot it with a laser to supercharge it and create a much bigger explosion. While being a little tricky to set up and requiring some precise aim this combo can be incredibly strong when lined up just right. There is even a stronger version of this combo using the charged laser to shoot the grenade. But with it requiring a lot of time to set up and some pretty precise timing, this version of the combo carries with it much more risk and is very hard to pull off in the middle of a firefight. But if you somehow do manage to pull it off, then expect to clear the encounter instantly because you just nuked the entire room. And probably yourself included, oops.