SteamWorld Heist II
Platforms: Current/Previous gen Engine: In-house (Scripts in LUA) Release Date: August 8 2024 Genre: Turn-based Strategy
SteamWorld Heist 2 is the sequel to the highly acclaimed first Heist-game, a light hearted turn-based strategy game with a bullet ricochet mechanic at its core.
I joined the project early in production as an intern Level Designer, and continued working there after the internship. I worked on the game for a little less than a ye
The game contains many small levels and scenarios, so I learned a lot about finding a design process that could be replicated while still offering variation to the player, and to create levels with a tight time constraint.
RESPONSIBILITIES
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- Ownership of 14 levels, each containing various degrees of mission scripting in LUA, designing encounters, scenarios and dialogue that makes sense with the world and characters intentions etc.
- Exploring and defining different shape languages and level layouts pertaining to the games different factions.
- Writing Design Statements for the different missions.
- Observing and interviewing during qualitative playtesting.
- Writing design specs for code when requesting specific mechanics
Stay or Go
Assorted Mission:
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- For this level, I scripted a new type of mission structure where the player can opt out after every encounter, but return to their base with less resources if they opt out before the end. For each room, the difficulty increases. This is the level I am the proudest of because I managed to make something new and refreshing from what we had.
Rampage Arena
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- This mission is a survival mission with enemy waves, with the twist being that the player decides when to call in a new wave by shooting a switch. A new type of mission for the Heist-games. In general, I was eager to try out different ways of making Heist levels by thinking outside of the box. Sometimes it payed of and it ended up being a refreshing take, other times it ended up requiring to much code resources to motivate the design.