BATTLE CHEFS
A Foray into Forraging
Battle Chefs was a senior production game I worked on in fall of 2019. Its development team consisted of a network programmer, a character/environment artist, a producer, and two designers (level and systems) for a total of 5 developers. Even with such a small team, we managed to deliver a unique take on the MOBA genre as a functioning vertical slice in just 3 months!
FEATURES
DRAFT UNIQUE ABILITIES
Use the ingredients you collect to draft new combat abilities tailored to your play-style.
COLLECT AND COOK
Traverse around a lush arena, searching for ingredients to cook with.
BATTLE ARENA COMBAT
Use your abilities to fight other chefs for dominance of the Golden Cauldron in 2v2 battle arena combat.
DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Designing systems for Battle Chefs taught me a lot about the design pipeline, and helped me solidigy what I loved and didn't love about Game Design. The development process and my contributions to the project are detailed below.
CHANGING THE NORM
When we first started concepting Battle Chefs, we wanted to take a known game concept, and turn it on its head. As a team we talked about the game genres we all enjoyed, and discussed what might be interesting to play.
We came to the conclusion that a networked 2v2 battle arena combat game would be fun to design, and showcase well as a vertical slice (our end goal).
We wanted to add a twist though. Something that would make gameplay more engaging. After some more discussion, we decided on adding in a drafting system. Inspired by recent games like Dota Auto Chess, a system that allowed players to use the environment around them to draft new abilities was born.
DRAFTING SYSTEM
As it stood in the game, there were three types of ingredients: peppers, mushrooms, and apples. Each of these corresponded to an aspect of combat: attack, defense, and support respectively. I designed a system, where depending on the ingredients you collected, you could draft abilities pertaining to a specific playstyle. TO keep things simple, each player got only 3 abilities in addition to their primary attack.
The more peppers you used in the draft, the more tailored towards attack the resultant ability would be. For example, using peppers to draft a burning secondary shot, over using mushrooms to draft a slower but stronger secondary shot.
RESULTANT GAMEPLAY
With the unique drafting system, among other combat related ones, the resultant game was quite interesting. Players fought over king of the hill style points, using abilities they had drafted to stave off attackers. Accumulating enough points would guarantee a win for that team.
We took time to test it until we had a game loop we were satisfied with; the player spawns and collects ingredients, and brings them back to their base to craft abilities. Then, they draft an ability of their choice. Next, they and their teammate would search for the new king of the hill point, and fight the other team for control. Finally, after the capture point reset, players would gather more ingredients for the next ability and so on.
TEAM MEMBERS
MITCHELL ZASA
Producer
JOHN IMGRUND
Network Programmer
MARIANNA MESSANA
Character / Environment Artist
CONNOR LITTLE
Level Designer
CONCLUSION
After being the primary systems designer on this project, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't really what I wanted to do. I liked doing it, and I think the systems that we did end up creating made sense for the game, but I realized that making content for systems that were already in place was something that was far more enjoyable for me to design.
It was also a great inssight on how to create a vertical slice on such a small team in just 3 months.