Sathya_K

 Having engineering related puzzles in a game where you play as an engineer is a vital. But there need to be a balance between the complexity of the puzzles and the engaging aspects of it, since DungeoNeer is not being built as simulator game the puzzles need to be more fun than deep. This where the design process gets strenuous.  The electrical engineering puzzle was easy to conceptualize as I was more familiar with it. One more aspect to this is that the players will have to deduce what's wrong with teh device themselves through a series of visual hints such as specific LED lights being off, flickering of lights, sparks flying etc. I'm going through my high school syllabus to learn more about how capacitors work in order to find a way to gamify this. As an Computer Science engineer myself it was necessary to add a hacking or decryption related puzzle. I love the hacking mini game in Cyberpunk 2077, its easy enough to learn the basic concept and understand the rules but ...

The link will take you to the interim pitch I gave in the class :  Game Design Pitch 2021-22: Sathya Narayanan Krishnan - DungeoNeer Openly articulating my own game design ideas to a class full of game designers and in front of 2 Professors, help me understand my own game better. The more I explained DungeoNeer the better I got at designing it. The feedback from the classmates were very valuable, most of  them were unfamiliar with Rogue-Like genre and their questions aimed at trying to decipher what the Equilibrium mechanic was opened my eyes to the wider audience and how I have to design the game not just for Rogur-like purists and hardcore fans but also for any newcomers to the genre. I was extremely delighted to answer their questions and almost of it was about Equilibrium. Even for fans of the genre this concept could be baffling at first and my classmate's enthusiasm towards the Equilibrium game mechanic really got me exhilarated as I felt like this could genuinely be a u...

Similar to how Rogue-Lites were an evolution of Rogue-Likes, a game mechanic akin to ‘Equilibrium’ may become a genre redefining element and continue to be implemented in some form in Rogue-Lite games going forward. Today pure Rogue-Likes are non-existent, because by its very nature it’s a niche genre and is considered too difficult for the broader audience, since you don’t carry over any progress from one run to another. Thus, Rogue-lites came to be and players were able to retain some form of currency/resource between runs and hence every subsequent run became ever so slightly easier as you could upgrade and level your character up before venturing out for another run. Personally, I would define Engineering as doing the best you can at that point in space and time, with whatever resource you have in hand. It’s not an ideal solution but it’s the optimal one within the resource and time constraints. So, I wanted to impart this ideology into the game, wherein the player would feel lik...

       A lot of games use procedurally generated content to keep players constantly engaged. In roguelike games everytime the player start a new run, the whole level is randomly generated using a procedural generation algorithms. What this means is that the map layout along with any other components of the level such as enemies and resources are randomly scattered and repositioned each time. Even though the level generation is random there are certain key aspects of each level that are kept consistent with every iteration, such as the art direction and the level design specific to that level are always maintained across each iteration.       For example, lets take 'Dead Cells', one of the best Roguelites to have ever been made, here the 'Toxic Sewers' level has a lot of verticality, wherein there player can move vertically across the level to different heights signifying the depth of the sewers. Whereas the 'Ramparts' level has only the walls as t...

 The first step in becoming a successful game designer is to play good games. That's where I'm at now, playing games all day hoping I will become good at making them. So, I decided to replay one the games that directly inspired me to design DungeoNeer, Prey. It is an exceptional immersive sim with impeccable level design and immense emphasis on player choice and gameplay approaches. It is one of the best looking games, not just for the graphical quality but also due to its robust and tonally consistent art direction. The environments are well realized both from a, artistic perspective as well from a level design perspective. For the research on how rogue-like games are created I'm looking into interviews with Hades' developers and I have found a few GDC conferences that explain the creative process and design rational behind their games. Level Up Your Game: The Untapped Potential of Roguelikes  this GDC talk by Tom Cadwell the VP of games at Riot, which is one of the pr...