Tea Time's Over
Tea Time's Over is a top-down action roguelike based on Alice In Wonderland. In this game a player's health is also their time limit to complete a run, so speed is key. It features tile-based procedural level and encounter generation, 7 abilities, and 12 upgrades. My ongoing focus in this project is centered on balancing gameplay pacing for varying player cohorts, in addition to refining the content pipeline for our procedural level design.
​
- Thrived collaborating in an interdisciplinary team of 24
- Designed and balanced meta progression system and accompanied currency
- Created rules and wrote documentation for procedural level system/pipeline
- Designed all levels
- Balanced procedural encounters using a Excel models and telemetry
- Worked closely with combat team to develop goals and behaviors for enemies
- Provided consistent, team-wide feedback to maintain creative vision and asset quality
Contributions
​​​
- On completion of level generation pipeline, the games level content increased ~150% in 30 minutes​
​
- Excel models enabled design team to re-draw and accurately implement new gameplay experiences in under an hour
​
- Lead 3 different level refactors to gradually free up environment artists and enable them to make our game beautiful ​
Impacts
BAD ENCOUNTER
GOOD ENCOUNTER
The difference between a fun encounter, and an artificially difficult or annoying counter in Tea Time's Over is only a few misplaced enemies. One of my primary focuses throughout the entirety of the project was to tune our procedural systems to eliminate bad encounters. Below are the spreadsheets I created and used to do that.
10ish Enemies
Like 200 Freakin' Guys
This sheet was used to draw a player engagement curve. Encounters are created based on the central blue line to ensure that the number of enemies and types of enemies are appropriate for players at that point of the play experience.
Bundle Simulations
Bundle Menu
To ensure a bad combination of enemies could not be spawned into the level, I designed a system which made that impossible. Instead of choosing an enemy to spawn, a room chooses a "Bundle" to spawn. A bundle is a good pack of enemies. The hope here is that if no individual bundle is bad, No encounter is bad.
