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Mini Infinity - Gameplay Designer
Mini Infinity is a 3rd-Person Wave Shooter in which the player's primary form of offense is to pull and throw their enemies as projectiles.
As a designer, I was mainly in charge of enemies; I designed both the game's wave system, and the concepts for the variant enemies, or "elites."
Timeframe - 12 Weeks
Engine - Unity 3D
Team Size - 9 Members
Design Goals - Enemies
When I was initially onboarded onto the team, my first task was to help improve the game's enemy variety. Initially, we only had a melee enemy, and vague plans of a ranged enemy. Implementing even these already required a high amount of art, programming scope, and most importantly, time. Time which we didn't have much of, considering the short time frame of the project.
To that end, I opted to go with what we called the "Elite" system. Rather than creating enemies wholecloth, a list of possible modifiers was created, themed around the influence of different planets. These modifers allowed us to create variants of enemies with differing abilities, greatly expanding enemy variety while decreasing the scope.
Fig. 1a - Concepts for "Elite" enemy designs, done by the Art team.
PDF - Documentation to Propose Elite System
Each ability had to be one that could be seamlessly applied to other enemies, regardless of type. As a result, I focused on abilities that were primarily passive in nature over additional active powers. While 8 were drafted, we initially focused on implementing two abilities.
The first was the "Reinforced" ability, which protects the enemy from damage from other thrown enemies, forcing you to directly enchant them. The second was the "Shielded" ability, which was the opposite: it protected the enemy from being enchanted and thrown, forcing you to use environmental objects or other enemies to deal with it.
Design Goals - Event-Based Wave System
Actually implementing the Elite System required a total overhaul of the game's existing systems so that changes could be implemented seamlessly without needing to be hardcoded. To that, I helped design and program an event system which could support varying "events." This didn't just include the elite enemies, but also the spawning of power ups (relics) and changes to the arena.
Fig. 1 - Initial "Lava" events to demonstrate functionality of system.
To demonstrate this, I implemented several example events in which the arena was filled with lava that had a randomized color. It allowed for a quick and easy demonstration of the system, without actually having to first design a wide variety of events.
Fig. 2 - Event System UI. Announces when a wave ends and when the next wave starts.
Further demonstration of this also required the implementation of a basic UI, which I helped design in program. By linking it with the event system, it was capable of announcing specific events, such as the change of waves.
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