JOAKIM BÖRJESSON
GAME DESIGNER
MY ROLE
I was the game designer on Go Fight Fantastic, and my tasks revolved around Level design, enemy and boss design, game balance, programming gameplay features, and enemy logic.
I worked at Dinomite Games for 3 years as their game designer, and Go Fight Fantastic is my first game release.
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I was not part of its conception, but I did get to start working on Dinomite Games' next game, providing multiple game pitches during the last months of production before release.
LEVEL DESIGN
One of my first undertakings at Dinomite games was the story mode, its structure, story beats, and levels.
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I worked closely with our Concept artist to produce hand-drawn mockup levels that we imported into the engine and tested.
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The game is a hack n' slash so we knew we needed to make levels that were divided into mostly corridors and arenas with some having secret areas or off-shoot paths, twists, and turns to keep things feeling natural and like you are actually going somewhere!
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MERCURY
I was tasked with completing the design of a playable character that existed as an early prototype version in an older version of the project.
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Her name was "Mercury," and she had a few things that the team wanted to stick around, fist she had a bow and arrow, and she could conjure a hammer to smash and push away her foes!
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I worked closely with our programmer to get her gameplay and combat style to be different from the rest of the roster, with the goal for her to achieve the fantasy of being a fast-paced ranged character with attacks that felt both powerful and offered her some control over the battlefield.
ENEMY DESIGN
When I joined, Go Fight Fantastic had a small roster of enemies that followed a line of established archetypes. There were the Assassin, Aider, Heavy, and Ranger. There was also a Tier 2 Heavy and elite version of the "Heavy" enemy archetype.
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There was also an unused design for an enemy that would later become the "Zoner" enemy, which was co-designed by the creative director and me.
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I was also responsible for devising and implementing the new tier of enemies. There were 3 tiers in total, each being a more elite version of the previous one.
BOSS DESIGN
There are 8 bosses, 4 of them being main bosses and the other 4 mini-bosses​. All of the main bosses, Froggy, Poi, Zev, and Empress, already had visual designs that needed boss combat designs. Froggy got the most development time allotted and is the first main boss you face. Froggy was shown before release at GamesCom and other events, so a lot of time was spent getting Froggy just right! Froggy is the boss I'm most proud of. I really got the chance to develop him over time and have had time to gather lots of feedback to take into account.
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The other bosses were more challenging to get right; their proportions were much closer to the player, which put more emphasis on having them perform longer and more grand animations and attacks.
HORDE MODE
Horde mode was the only mode when I joined Dinomite games, and it acted like a testing ground for mechanics and enemies, but it was also a really fun secondary mode, and I was tasked to improve it.
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The time budget for the Horde Mode was much smaller than the story mode, so I had to keep it simple.
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I looked at many reference games where the focus was on a horde mode-like mode.
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I re-coded the enemy spawn system and designed and implemented a player upgrade system where players get stronger and stronger as the enemies grow in number and in strength.
METEORITES
Go Fight Fantastic has an item and player power progression system that we refer to and call "meteorites." These are gemstone-looking items that you obtain in the game primarily by defeating enemies and bosses.
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There are over 200 Meteorites in the game, which I designed and implemented.
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The player can equip a maximum of 3 at a time, each giving the player an assortment of stat boosts, increasing things such as health, damage, and movement speed.
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These upgrades where designed to both help players cover a weakness they felt they had while also fulfilling a power fantasy within the characters initiate abilities.
CUTSCENES
I was tasked to create the in-game cutscene for all our levels. I was given the script of what they were gonna say and where the cutscene would take place.
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I created the cutscenes using Unity's timeline and some custom scripts to trigger cutscenes and effects, and the cutscene actors where custom made to fit with our sprite-based characters.
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I used Unity's timeline signal system to call for which animations to be played.
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Being the cutscenes' “director" was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed coming up with all the ways to manipulate the camera from a top-down perspective to get emotions across to the player.
