GAMEPLAY DESIGNER

I was the sole gameplay designer on a team 3 that also included an economy/monetization designer and a live-op/events designer. Battle Strike Force was my first foray into the mobile market after many years in the console industry. I set out to get some hands on experience designing-for and operating a live-ops/GaaS title.

What is Battle Strike Force? Battle Strike Force is a hero collecting military RPG x 4x MMO hybrid. Players explore a vast overworld map to uncover campaign missions and fight in PvE battles to collect heroes/tanks and earn rewards. Additionally, Battle Strike Force has a base building component where players can collect resources, build up their base, recruit troops, and initiate research upgrades that give boosts in all parts of the game. Later parts of the game involve guilds, PvP, and raid gameplay.

When I started at Beyond Games, Battle Strike Force’s combat was in a muddled place. Two opposing forces of 5 units, each consisting of 2 heroes with special abilities and 3 troops, would duke it out in a rock-em-sock-em numbers games. The action was tame and did not inspire much excitement. One of my first tasks was to create design pitches for improving the gameplay in Battle Strike Force but with limited engineering resources available. Any new features would have to be derived from an existing system.

Over the course of 2019, features that were added included new special ability interactions, interactive battle tapping to give players some agency over the outcome of battle, faction based rock-paper-scissor advantages, hero classes each with a different battle interaction with how special ability energy/”mana” was generated, hero class based rock-paper-scissor advantages, auto-play, play speeds, and different targeting schema. Many of these features would then be used by the monetization and live-ops designers to create events and special IAP.

Other responsibilities on Battle Strike Force included creating pitch and implementation documentation for quality of life improvements, retention mechanics, UI/UX improvements, and new gameplay features. When approved by the Product Director, I would then work with production and engineering to have the tasks implemented and tuned to spec.

HERO DESIGN

For a hero collecting game, hero development was a big part of Battle Strike Force. When I arrived at Beyond Games, the hero pool was only at 18 and the game had not seen a hero release in at least 3 months. While the game was still in development, we had technically soft-soft launched in around 3 countries. Our true soft launch would eventually reach most major markets excluding the USA.

Unlike Skylanders, heroes in Battle Strike Force did not have to have a physical toy to accompany their design so I was able to take a much more hands-on approach in the visual designs of the characters. That said, the goal is still the same. We wanted to deliver to the players an exciting and cool character they would want to collect and even buy. Collaborating with the Art Director, I would make initial passes at style guides that would be delivered to outsourcing art houses. An overall theme would be established that would help inform how the hero’s tank or vehicle was concepted/modeled by our internal (but remote in South Africa!) art team. VFX would be created and the implementation would be done by engineers based of specifications given. Coming from an environment where I was used to directing and implementing all of my designs, this project definitely helped give me many reps working with outsourcing vendors, external/remote teams in different time zones, as well as remote engineers who don’t speak English as their first language (I guess I didn’t mention most of our engineers worked out of El Salvador). Ultimately I was able hone my communication skills as the distance and time zone delays required you be as clear as possible with your documentation.

DIVERSITY & REPRESENTATION

One of the things I am most proud about in Battle Strike Force’s hero roster is our diversity and representation. One thing I set out and achieved was to constant maintain a near 50/50 gender split in the roster. Sadly, we did not have a strong enough character narrative to effective show non-gendered characters, but it was something that was considered. In addition to gender diversity, Battle Strike Force consistently depicted our female characters and strong, battle hardened, and capable soldier instead of derivative sexual objects as seen in many hero collecting games. The diversity did not stop with gender, however. Ethnicity and age diversity were also strong in Battle Strike Force. When I first arrived at Beyond Games, the Battle Strike Force roster consisted of 18 heroes, 4 females, 4 persons of color, and only 1 female person of color. At 50 released heroes, there were 22 female characters, 20 persons of color, and 12 female persons of color. Of the unreleased characters, another 42 characters, 22 more females, 20+ persons of color, and 15 female persons of color. There were more in the original style guides but not every design survived through the art production phase. I am a strong believer that diversity and representation are achievable in video games. It does take a little bit of extra effort but in the end, not a whole lot more. I hope this is something other companies will all strive for as an industry standard.