After being integrated with the new team for a few weeks, the cogs are starting to really start spinning. The first couple weeks were slow, trying to find spots to put people and familiarizing the new members with pre-existing concepts and systems. Now that the onboarding process has ended, us new members have had the chance to influence the creative process more. As a designer, I expressed interest in developing ability kits for the monoliths so I was tasked with refining the kits of the initial 3 monoliths and then creating new kits off of previous conceptual monoliths.
Andrew and I worked hard together on refining the kits of Arat, Vaktul, and Yurisar so that they fit their archetypes more. We wanted to push Arat more as a damage focused character, Vaktul as a hard control character, and Yurisar as a map roaming pest. We changed one ability on Arat to do damage when it previously just slowed. We changed around a few abilities for Vaktul to make him generally feel better to play and make his choices a bit more interesting. Yurisar’s change intends to make him more annoying than he previously was. We changed a defense ability that creates a big rock pillar into an ability that spawns totems the opponent will have to deal with.
More recently, I’ve had to work on new monolith concepts. Those being implemented might be delayed a bit but that wasn’t known at the start of the week. All the designers had a meeting and talked about the monoliths that excited us from the Specs Document and we chose a few to work on. Jae and I were tasked with working on them together. He took charge of a fire based monolith and I took charge of a monolith that was two monoliths in one. We also collaborated on a plague based monolith which we talked about and finalized at the end of the week.
I’ve enjoyed working on abilities since I think it suits me well and I really enjoy it as a creative outlet but with where we’re going, it looks like ability design is gonna be on the back burner. Now, I’ve been tasked with designing AI with one of the programmers so I’ll have to do a bunch of research. It’s intimidating but I feel ready for it and would love to jump into a spreadsheet and just figure it out through a couple of passes.
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