Lee Kee Chong​ 

I've always been a hardcore gamer. Subliminally, I've come to appreciate great system/character design and gameplay balances. I am not those who will play all characters and try and analyze them. Usually, I'll only play one or two, and be very good at it, understand how the mechanics and design works. From there, it is easier to understand other characters design and how each mechanics interacts with level design and other features of the game.

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The Science in Game Design

A lot of people like to describe game design as both science and art. Well, I'm more of the science person. When playing board games, I tend to immediately focus on finding the most effective way to win the game, the dominant strategy and how each mechanics complements each other and what are the strength and weakness of each decision players make.

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Clash Royale - Feature Concision

During the first launch, it is astonish to gaze upon how compact and intertwined different features of CR are, well fitted for a hand held device. In 5 minutes, players get to experience the deep and immersive combat system, the genius-style-cut-everything-unnecessary progression system, the reward system, win-win (player and developer) monetization schemes, and social element.

 

They have taken every complicated yet compelling and essential features in a mobile game and simplified it into such a clean, harmonized features, like factorizing a highly complex 50 characters long math equation into an elegant, highly readable 7 characters one.

 

Overwatch - Bold, well researched innovation

Multiplayer games have always envied Trading Card Game's innate design advantage of increasing depth and replayability through content generation. MOBA games like DOTA, League of Legends have similar, if not better benefits each time a new champion is designed. Blizzard has been releasing new IPs with huge market, like Hearthstone (TCG) and Heroes of the Storm (MOBA), it will only be surprising if they don't release a FPS game.

 

However, Overwatch is a rather unique type of FPS game, very different from the usual call of duty or battlefield series. Instead of having various weapons, they have multiple characters/classes which are unique to their own identities. This type of design is unusually similar to MOBA games where each game feels and plays differently depending on which character/class is in play. These types of games are infinitely deep, as long as they are able to design champions which are unique to the existing ones, allowing players to develop various different meaningful team compositions.

 

Diablo III - Character, Item, Level, Monster Design

When playing Diablo III, not only did I look for the optimal skills set and itemization, I also analyze the design reason behind them. Why did this character has these skills? What is the personality of this character or unit? Why did these skills have these different upgrades, and what kind of situation are they meant they for? How do these items drop rate and location influence player's behavior?

 

It intrigued me to understand the level design in Diablo III. Why are the monsters behaving this way at this location? Why are these bosses designed this way mechanically and how are they different from each other, in that act, and across acts?

 

Starcraft II - Race and Unit Balance, Level Design

When playing competitive Starcraft II, it has become clearer to me that the balance between races do not just come from stats itself, it has a lot to do with race personality. Some strategies/units are indeed easy to use AND powerful. These low skill high power strategies/units are essential for multiplayer games, as they are the initialization phase of new players to be "good" at the game. However, they will have a prominent counter to it.

 

Balancing between apple orange banana can be tricky, but the important point to note is fairness. Is this unit or strategy fair? What kind of counterplay can the opponent adopt? What can be done if a player is mechanically perfect? The depth of the game is complemented so beautifully by the level design. How are each race played differently and that some strategies are obviously more suited in this specific map such that everytime a game is played, they try to give players a different experience, something to learn from yourself, as well as others. A game as deep as starcraft can never be fully analyzed, but it definitely helped me a lot as a designer.

 

League of Legends - Game focus and Identity, Champion Design, Counterplay

The most obvious shift from DOTA was from skill base, farm system to team fight, objective focus. This change allows a lot of non-hardcore players to be able to enjoy the game as much as hardcore players. Their level design has changed a lot to cater for more objective plays so as to increase player interaction, instead of playing the farm game.

 

In season 4, they specifically mentioned about how they want champion diversity to be a real thing, and actually walking the talk. Champion designs are becoming a very important factor in terms of game sustenance as new champions aim to add a new dynamic to the game and changes the entire game feel, which increases the depth of the game.

 

There are many elements which add to the success of the game, but the one that I love and learn the most is what Tom Cadwell talk about. Counterplay. In my opinion, this is a very important aspect of multiplayer games, which is very often neglected even in professional games. It provides meaningful choices for the player using the mechanics and the player being used on, forcing them to weigh the risk and reward for the choice they about to make. It is counterplay that let the game creates depth, to allow players to differentiate themselves in terms of skills, by increasing the amount of valid choices given to players.