Blast away endless waves of Yokai in this Japanese themed roguelite.
Game overview
- Reverse Bullet Hell
- Japanese themed, horror, action, strategy
- PLAY THE GAME (WINDOWS)
Work Overview
- My Work: Game Designer, System Designer, Level Designer
- Started at pre-production.
- Lead team meetings and first line of communication with stakeholders.
- Managed outsourcing of 3rd party artists and developers.
- Part of initial R&D, concept ideation, KITs, core game mechanics, designed UI/UX, documentation and map designs. Full ownership of all design features.
Project Details
This project started as our love for the game Vampire Survivors. I saw a lot of ways to improve the genre, so we set out creation our version titled; Lament of Kyoto. I started working on our initial R&D while the artists were busy with style research. During this time I outlined several pain points in Vampire Survivors. The biggest two being the 30 min duration being a huge time commitment (we changed this to 15 minutes), and the abrupt lame ending of getting 1shot by the Reaper. The last one I made a core pillar in our design philosophy. I did not want our game to feel boring or lame at any moment, so we decided pretty early on we wanted interesting and unique boss fights. The rest of our KITs allow us to strikes a nice balance between staying true to genre-defining features, while still bringing our own unique twists.
KITs:
Japanese setting and Edo-artstyle:
Lament of Kyoto is the only game within the genre that has Japan as its setting and theme. Competitors mainly use Western themes such as zombies, monsters, and the Middle Ages. We are the only ones to use Japanese folklore as the foundation and inspiration of our game.
3D Graphics:
Unlike competitors, Lament of Kyoto is a 3D game. We only have one 3D competitor, the rest are all 2D, or of extremely low quality.
Freedom in gameplay:
While our competitors only offer one upgrade path per weapon, we offer several to allow the player to experiment freely. We also innovate by creating unique gameplay elements for each map to give each level a strong and unique identity.
Exciting Enemies
Bosses in our game should feel like actual bosses, not reused enemies scaled 5x. Each boss should make the player tremble before their might (mechanics), each new enemy type should excite the player with wonder, and each event should put the player at the edge of their seat.
Multiple Hats
As a small studio I had to wear multiple hats besides working as our Game/System/Level Designer. We had very little budget but still had the need to outsource some of our work, so I took care of the recruiting and managing of the outsourced talent. I did our UI/UX design and handled the preparation and launch of our Steam Page together with everything surrounding it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2178640/Lament_of_Kyoto/
Made in: Unity
[2022]
Robbin Lieverse 