I was a combat designer and creative director on…
Remanence - 2024
Genre: Action-Adventure, Soulslike
Engine: Unreal Engine (5.2)
Platform: PC
Production period: Sept. 2023 - Dec. 2024
Team name: ToSoftware
Team size: 25 (5 engineers, 10 artists, 6 designers, and 4 sound)
Full team credits: Anthon Reid, Ryman Barnett, David Porter, Riley Durbin, Cameron Myers, Simi Randhawa, Kira Shinoda, Liz Ponkow, Levi Yang, Zeke Lacy, Benjamin Poot, Nolan Lovelace, Ben Tuttle, Vasiliki Makris, Roberto Velasquez, Skylar Isaacs, Eric Park, Dylan Simpson, Blake Tran, Vasilisa Shcherbakova, Isaac Mitchell, Austin Clark, Santi Soza, Tyler Radocaj, and Caleb Sheffield.
Developed over the course of three semesters at DigiPen, Remanence is a first-person melee action game which I directed and worked as a designer on.
Creative Direction: Listen, Learn, Iterate.
As Creative Director, I oversaw the entirety of my team’s creative output and directed the team towards a cohesive vision. Part of my strategy was to remain very open to the spontaneity of ideas and discoveries within my team (across all disciplines, from top to bottom), and I believe this open-mindedness was a great asset to our success.
While I’ve officially held the title of Creative Director throughout the duration of the project, I’ve also worked in-depth in a few specific areas of design on Remanence, serving as our sole Narrative Designer, our primary Combat Designer through the first 9 months of the project, and one of two User Research specialists within the design team.
Combat Design: Dancing with Death.
The combat direction of Remanence was meant to bridge the gap between fans of Soulslike action games and first-person shooters, as well as leverage the team’s developmental strengths.
First-person camera perspective embodies the player within the action.
Enemies are quick and lethal, but so is the player.
Different enemies have different behavioral and attack styles, which the player can observe and learn to overcome mid-combat, or through quick trial-and-error cycles.
Rewarding a varied playstyle:
Above all else, I learned a unified lesson from both my experiences in user research and creative direction:
Ideation is a valuable tool, but truly good design is tempered through exposure to others’ perspectives and interactions, whether those be within the team or from external users.
But why the first-person perspective?
Soulslike games tend to have a third-person camera for a variety of reasons, most notably: clarity. When the camera is outside the player character’s body, there’s more space onscreen for the designer to leverage animations to convey information about both the player character and the enemies they’re fighting. Our rationale, in contrast, was:
First-person perspective stands out among other Soulslike titles, as does Soulslike melee combat stand out in a camera perspective dominated by shooters.
Executing animation-driven melee combat in first-person was an interesting design challenge for both visual and structural reasons.
A first-person perspective had immediate advantages for fostering a sense of character embodiment and environmental immersion in the player.
Early on in Remanence’s production, we had issues with playtesters defeating our enemies with simple button-mashing, or “kiting” enemies while their health and mana regenerated; these were both examples of dominant strategies that bypassed the “dance” we were trying to create.
While some new enemy behaviors and numerical tweaks had a hugely positive impact on this issue, the philosophy behind the player’s resources and affordances had to adapt to encourage varied player engagement.
Stamina regeneration for dodging attacks was slowed, but made to regenerate in instantaneous chunks if the player successfully parries an attack.
Rather than a persistent resource that drains with use, mana drains over time and can ONLY be gained via parrying enemy attacks.
Choosing how to spend mana became a pivotal player decision: Do you…
…expend mana on a long-distance magic attack?
…hold mana to passively boost sword damage?
…or risk playing defensively until your mana overflows, triggering an extremely high-damage execution ability?
The final iteration of our combat system differed substantially from other games in this genre, thanks to our resource management philosophy shifting towards a “rewards ecosystem” where the player was systemically rewarded for feats of mechanical skill.
In other words, I didn’t just want parrying to just be a matter of survival; I also wanted it to give the player more power and more agency. Rather than being powerful all the time, this combat design encourages the player to ebb and flow (or “dance”) between states of power and vulnerability.
Curious about how this system evolved through testing? I was also the primary user researcher on this project, and wrote about it on the user research page.