Concept
Outrun rising lava by climbing the tower of blocks being built around you. Drill through falling blocks to avoid being crushed, but watch out, each one destroyed is one less between you and death.
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Endless runner with consequences
Most endless runners offer only twitch-based gameplay, but we slowed down the pace to give players the opportunity to think through their actions and make decisions that affect them in the long term.
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Dynamically choose to make the game more difficult for bigger rewards
Long-term progression requires a lot of coins, and the easiest way to earn them is to actively work against your objective.
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Daily Challenges with new game modes
Every day of the week has a new game mode to play. It's a daily login turned gameplay challenge: mix things up with a twist on established rules!
Story
Strap on the boots of Eustice Digs, a prospector digging in a mine, to find yourself in a hairy predicament! It seems like Eustice might've dug a little to far into the ground and now he has lava filling up this mine he's worked so hard to construct. Now you have to help him find a way out before he either is is ingulfed in lava or crushed by rocks!
My Role
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My role as a game designer and analyst for the game is to handle playtesting, monetization, assessing the balance of the in-game economy, and design of the game from the very start. Recently I have been more on the marketing side getting our game ready for soft release in New Zealand since we have gotten our MVP done sooner than expected and now we're making sure to polish the product. I also help design power-ups and boosts that adhere to the flow state of a typical mobile game.
Specifics
Majorly the boosts section of our game is what I have designed for the player to have an advantage when starting each run of the game. The thing about that is you can only use one boost at a time. I have limited the use of buying multiple because the boosts really change up how the next run goes. From double coins for the next five minutes to a drill-rocket boosting the player up to 100m at a time, these boosts vary. The boosts of the game can be various things that benefit the player which isn't constraining to the development of these mechanics at all. Designing the power-ups are more up to the whole team for more ideas to be made but they are more constraining because it has to adhere to the setting of the game while boosts adhere to mechanics mostly.
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Being apart of monetization and the creating the boosts go hand and hand since focusing on the in-game economy gives me more information on how much a boost should be and what the player thinks about it. If players don't seem to like it then I can go back and AB test prices of literally everything.
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Playtesting the game is also a big part of what I do, it helps the team understand where problems are in specific areas and lets us find and report those pesky bugs. I like play testing not just for what I stated earlier though, I love to see how the players react to our game in person and it puts a smile on face seeing them place as if its a finalized and ready game they've been playing forever.
Work
Monetization Model 1
Monetization Model 2
This is our finalized plan which will be AB tested with model 1 in after soft release
Playtesting & Analytical Work
I do these every week for our team to look back on and make things better in each of their areas.
This is used after each playtest to get feedback from players
All of the information from the feedback form is put into an excel file thats linked to it. We can then compare answers and access where the problems are.
I use unity analytics to track what players are doin inside the game for example how high up they get and when they die.
Gifs
Trailer
When I first started out on the team the game was just a small final project for a class we had to take to go on to the next level of the game design major. It derived its game mechanics from the old flash game avalanche. All you could do was jump on top of square shaped objects to get away from lava which would undoubtedly get the player stuck. Not much effort was put into it and this was the inspiration we derived when making the game. Please enjoy the trailer!