ISLES OF WAR
ROLE : TECHNICAL DESIGNER
DISNEY INTERACTIVE, JULY 2012 - APRIL 2014
Isles of War was a social MMO RTS game released October 2013 released by Disney Interactive on Facebook. I was involved in the technical design and implementation of Battle AI, Real Time Synchronous World, Quest and Event systems. On the design side, I wrote design documents and prototyped battle mechanics to achieve balanced real time and strategy gameplay.
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CITY BUILDINGWhen a player first enters the game he is assigned a persistent world location, i.e. and island that serves as his home base. From a design perspective, the user island is the touch point from which he can access all other features of the game. To do so, the base needed to provide mechanisms to engage in resource generation, inventory management, alliance building, and event participation in a unified manner so that players aren't learning new systems for managing each category of gameplay. This requirement led to the concept of "structures". Players build and level up different types of structures which allow launching of
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different menus based on the type of structure. For example, a "Dock" structure would be used to manage deploying and repairing your fleets. Level progression of these structures was thereby critical as they were now not simply aesthetic, but portals into game functionality. We wanted players to be able to start leveling up fairly quickly so that they would feel a sense of accomplishment early on. The leveling patterns of structures was also important as this was our only means of navigating player behavior. Considering the plethora of different game features, it became all the more important for us to guide players through the means to achieve success before releasing them entirely.
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WORLD EXPLORATIONThe world is hierarchized into zones which divide into sectors which divide into rings. This hierarchy was more an internal breakup for engineering purposes rather than a way we wanted players to envisage the world. For the most part, we wanted players to think of the world as a big expanse with resource holdings concentrated in certain areas. However players would navigate the world based on coordinates rather than named locations. User placement in the world was extremely important as it would define both participatory player behaviors such as forming alliances and predatory
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behavior such as preying on low level players. Factors considered during the new user flow for island assignment was average sector level, number of friends in sector, and overall density of sector. Since user placement was so critical, we also had to design an island lapsing system. In this system, if a player hasn't logged in for over two months then the location would "lapse", being freed up to be used by incoming new users. This didn't mean the players progress was lost; it simple meant if he did login at a point in the future he would be assigned a different location if his original one was already taken.
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BATTLE SYSTEMOn a high level the battle system comprised of an RTS naval combat system where a player would assign five weapon equipped ships to a fleet and maneuver the ships to fire on their broadside. The final battle system that made it into the game was the product of a long process of iteration, refinement and in many cases tough decisions of discarding things that simply didn't work! The original thought process was that battle would be the core engagement area in the game. Considering also that the game was targeted to a "core gamer" audience, the original designs were more heavily real
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time than strategy oriented. Players could control individual ships by clicking and maneuvering them. However, as we play-tested the game it became clear that this was a fairly complex system. Moreover, it was also becoming clear that battle was being seen only as a means to an end. The core engagement of the game was coming from other aspects such as world exploration, alliance battles and events. Hence, we went back to the drawing board to come up with a system that was simpler and emphasized a greater element of strategy, without phasing the real time aspect to zero. What we came up with was a flocking mechanism wherein the player controls a single ship and the rest of the fleet follows in a follow the leader mechanic.