VAMPOWER
VAMPOWER is a top-down tower defense rogue-like heavily inspired by survivor-likes and bullet-heaven games.
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Level Designer
4 weeks
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Scrum Master
Team
Summary
VAMPOWER is a top-down tower defense rogue-like heavily inspired by survivor-likes and bullet-heaven games.
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Your Master, an Evil Vampire Overlord, has been defeated, but he’s not completely dead just yet. Wield multiple weapons & hold your ground and defend your master’s heart from waves of invading heroes & local peasants as they try to destroy your master once and for all!
Core Gameplay
Character Progression
Defeated enemies drop blood. Use this resource to increase your abilities to unleash carnage.
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Auto-Weapons
Each of the four weapons attack on their own. Your job is to navigate the hordes and apply maximum damage.
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Tower Defense
Experiment with tower synergies using multiple tower types
Project Role
Level Designer
Scrum Master
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Designed multiple level prototypes.
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Conducted extensive genre research.
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Determined enemy spawn types, frequency, and location.
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Placed all art assets in the game.
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Lead all morning standup meetings.
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Recorded all meeting minutes.
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Lead and facilitated weekly retrospectives.
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Collaborated with Product Owner in delegating tasks.
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Conducted individual follow-ups when needed.
Final Level
Legend
Player Start
Tower Location
Enemy Spawn
Master's Heart
Level Explorations
VAMPOWER is all about movement and combat. Through map geometry, I wanted to encourage a gameplay experience that represented our mechanics. Therefore, I explored several possible play spaces to discover which would best accomplish that.
The Cross - First Iteration
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The Goal:
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Create a small, challenging space with a central position of defense. This should also allow for greater enemy visibility.
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Use this space to test our base mechanics.
The Problem:
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This layout demonstrated the highest level of difficulty in terms of mob management.
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The 360 design leaves the heart vulnerable from several angles, and offers few options for the player to reasonably defend it.
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Prototyping tower building, AoE damage, and enemy behavior.
The Solution:
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Has potential as a harder level later in the game.
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Requires the player to prioritize tower defense to compensate for the greater enemy presence. This lead to under-utilization of weapon upgrades.
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This conflicted with our design goals. Therefore, we discarded this layout during the prototyping phase.
Mr. T - Second Iteration
The Goal:
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Reduce the number of potential enemy spawn points
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Create more opportunities for balanced tower defense gameplay and weapon upgrades.
The Problem:
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This layout forced a type of gameplay that did not flow well.
Traversing the level felt tedious at times. More towers could be placed, and player abilities were utilized, but the pacing felt off.
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I tried two variations of the same layout, but flipped and with one additional spawn point.
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As I had ownership over art sourcing,
I prioritized validating the art direction by creating a simple set-dressed level.
​The Solution:
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Tower locations were placed in strategic clusters for improved level flow
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This enhanced the pacing and gave a stronger sense of progression. However:
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The space still lacked the tightness we wanted
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Enemy positions were still obscured at certain points, and there were too many towers.
The Dub - Third Iteration
The "Dub" or "W" design almost made it into the final build. It addressed two issues that the "Mr. T" layout did not: reduced tower locations and greater enemy spawn visibility.
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The Problem:
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Simplify enemy spawn points and tower locations
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Make spawns easier for the player to respond to.
Introducing fewer tower spawns helped with balance by introducing meaningful scarcity, and discouraging pure tower dependence. Lastly, the heart was still too vulnerable up to this point.​
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The Solution:
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Fewer, longer paths to the heart
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Only two accessible enemy spawns
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Powerful tower synergies emerged that were not present in earlier layouts.
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This was due to having fewer tower spawn locations.
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The Result: We were getting closer. Playtest feedback still indicated that players felt like their towers were not helping them defend the master's heart.
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Therefore, I took the best of this layout and brought it into the next iteration.
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FINAL ITERATION
The Trident
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"The Trident" is the culmination of several playtests, iterations, and team feedback sessions. However, there was still a huge challenge to tackle.
The Challenge:
One thing I came to learn throughout iteration, was to consider some feedback as balancing issues.
Enemies are hard to see? That's fair. I needed to examine the context of this further.
Maybe enemies didn't need to be totally visible at all times.
Could I use lack of enemy visibility as a means to present an exciting challenge to players, increase tension, and create more potent emotional payoffs?
The Privileged Perspective
A common theme among all iterations is the multi-level layout. I wanted to use that here to offer players a strong position from which they feel close to their master's heart while protecting it, while also providing multiple sightlines across the map.
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There are risks to camping this position. For one, any towers you have built along the path are totally open to enemy attack. Towers are highly effective at pulling aggro, weakening enemies, and creating early to mid-game farming opportunities. Therefore, players are incentivized to protect these economy boosters.
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In addition to the sightlines, I created multiple paths to either side of the map for rapid response to threats. The further the player moves from their master's heart, the less of a map overview they have.
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This dynamic provided a fun challenge for some, yet still received mixed feedback.
REFLECTION
This is probably my favorite group game project during my education at Futuregames. I got the chance to work in one my favorite genres and do a deep dive on the design challenges developers face when making this type of game.
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It also contains a type of level design I have never built for. I felt like I was working outside of my comfort zone for the majority of the project, and this forced me to really focus on what level design is. Furthermore, it pushed me to seek out colleagues and mentors to provide much needed insight, guidance, and feedback.
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There is a lot I would have done differently if given the opportunity. First, for tower defense gameplay, I would have preferred placing enemies on splines so I could more easily control their pathing, and therefore test and examine tower placement more critically.
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Also, I would have liked to include more paths for players to utilize throughout the map as a means to respond to enemy threats. Right now, they all branch off from a single location. But I think it would be interesting to make them connect closer to the enemy spawn locations, for example.
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