A commercial roguelike chess game shipping on Steam. I designed the pieces, buffs, environments and AI behaviour, and solved how to teach a game that never explains itself.
We wanted the mystery of The Binding of Isaac: no explanations, just discovery, in a game that's far more complex.
With zero explanation, players quit out of confusion. And the AI opponent had to feel like a person, not a calculator.
A camera that zooms on new actions, and AI logic reverse-engineered from my own play.
Reverse-engineering player choices. While playing, I wrote down why I made certain moves, then turned that reasoning into the AI's decision logic.
Weighing the surroundings. A trick borrowed from Minecraft: terrain tiles carry values the AI factors in. Dangerous tiles score negative, favourable ones positive.
Without any explanation, and because it's much more complex than Isaac, players quit because they were confused.
Instead of giving in and adding a tutorial, one of the things I did is build a camera that zooms in on every new action.
Players didn't always understand what happened, but knew why it happened, and tried to find out instead of being confused.
Tools for my partner. Systems are split cleanly between front end and back end, so my friend can create content without causing systemic bugs.
Content that scales. New buffs and pieces slot in without touching the backend.
Created pieces with their own unique abilities and movement patterns
Designed interactions between different buffs to create strategic depth
Designed & implemented boards with unique tiles & dangers, such as tornadoes and quicksand
AI logic built from my own play reasoning and tile-weighting
Designed systems like visualisations to provide clear feedback to players
Led the codebase and ran the game's marketing
A tutorial would have fixed confusion but killed the mystery. A zooming camera fixed it and kept the vision.
Writing down why I made each move gave the AI a human logic I couldn't have invented from scratch.
Interactions between buffs, pieces and terrain matter more than any single item.
