NOARA THE CONSPIRACY | Max EMSALLEM | Technical Game Designer

Previous project

NOARA: THE CONSPIRACY

Lead Game Designer | Technical Game Designer

Role

Systems Designer | Technical Designer

Presence

From early prototype to release

Engine

Unity

Type

Profesionnal

Genre

Turn-based | Tactical | PvP | Strategy

Platform

Status

Released - Live Game

Year

2021

ABOUT

Noara - The Conspiracy revisits turn-based strategy games and offers a new experience in an original heroic-fantasy universe.

Noara is a game of its own thanks to a unique mechanic: Noara allows you to play in real time during the opponent's turn!

Indeed, even during the defensive turn you will be fully active. You will have to use tactics and speed of execution to counter your opponent's attacks and destroy his stronghold in order to win.

PORTFOLIO PRIVATE ACCESS

Details about some of the work I've done on this project is locked behind a password.

Please click the button below and use the password available on my resume to get access to more details, more images and more documentation.

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MY ACHIEVEMENTS

On this project, I was Lead Game Designer and Technical Game Designer.

My achievements are:

Launched Noara: The Conspiracy on Steam, with 100 reviews and thousands of downloads.
Lead a team of 3 designers from prototype phase to release.
Improved communication and task management with internal tools automation.
Writing and keeping up to date the GDD and other technical documentation.
Lightened programmers’ work by prototyping some game design features on Unity using C# in order to test them before developing them.
Designed a matchmaking system, improving matching between our players for more balanced games.
Allowed players to play against AI by designing an AI System in collaboration with our development team.
Designed a Data Collection system to track different variables such as win condition, game duration, items looted, units played to better balance the game.
Increased players possibilities by designing new content such as units, items and new game modes.
Managed and improved the localization pipeline by more than 50% by developing an internal tool using Excel VBA.

MATCHMAKING SYSTEM

I designed an MMR system for our game. My work is based off ELO and TrueSkill.

I started my work on this system by exploring what was being done in other games and learning about multiple MMR systems and their strength.

When I had a design I felt was good, I simulated using Google Sheets to test and see if it behaved how I wanted it. I then tweaked it until I was satisfied.

DATA COLLECTION SYSTEM

I designed a Data Collection system to track different variables such as win condition, game duration, items looted, units played to better balance the game.

I wrote this documentation for developers to know which information to track, and how to display them using an external tool.

AI SYSTEM

I worked on the AI system in the game for players to be able to play against AI. The AI needed to be efficient but quite easy to develop, as not much of the budget was allocated in developing it.

We used a utility-based system. Each unit has a list of possible tasks it can perform, and some conditions and score modifiers for each one.

Each task is then weighted based on these conditions, and the AI executes the highest scoring task.

The following images are from the Excel I made for developers to work on the AI.

Here, you can see some of the tasks, conditions and score modifiers of one of the units:

Here, you can find the description of some of the conditions and how they are met:

Here, you can find details on how the AI choose a target, based on distance, health and target priority. The goal is to find the best target to hit. Some units are way cheaper than others, and might not be worth killing when damaging another very important unit is possible.

To test the design and tweak conditions, score modifiers and all formulas, I developed a tool on Unity using C#. This tool allowed me to simulate game situations, and compute scores for each task of each unit.

We used this tool to simulate whole game in 1v1: a player was playing normally, the other was playing as the AI and making decisions only based on this tool.

It helped iterate quickly on the system, picking up some unexpected behaviour we could fix very early on, without waiting for the development team to finish programming it.

Here is a video of the tool:

TOOLTIP INTEGRATION TOOL

I managed and improved the localization pipeline by more than 50% by developing an internal tool using Excel VBA.

Before this tool, tooltips had to be manually edited from the JSON, editing each language independently.

As we had no one to work on an internal tool in the development team, I used an Excel and some VBA code to create a tool allowing to export an Excel sheet into some JSON readable by our game.

The sheet is a simple Excel with each language on a column, making it easy to edit everything and to send it to translators.

I then used some VBA scripts to export the sheet into JSON.

I also implemented a tag system allowing to automatically find some easy to write tags and replace it by custom TextMeshPro tags used in the game engine (ex: in the Excel I write "/mp/" and it is automatically changed to "<style="t_MastPhys">" when exported, which is then read by TextMeshPro to apply the correct style).

You can find below some of the VBA code I wrote, and screenshots of the excel sheet and resulting JSON.

ExcelToJSON VBA

UNIT DESIGN

I increased players possibilities by designing new content such as units, items and new game modes. You can find below an example of a unit I and my colleagues designed: