Samat Imanalin
Technical game designer
Strategy-management game set in the golden age of rail transportation
General information
Project information
Genre:
Work duration:
Team size:
Platform:
Primary Role:
Strategy, Simulation
February - June 2023
around 30
PC, Consoles
Quality assurance, Game design, Game balancing
Quality Assurance
Over the course of my internship I have gained experience working within the QA pipelines of Gaming Minds Studios and contribute to the overall quality of the game through my efforts.
I have participated in the testing process throughought the development process. Testing builds on PC as well as the current and previous generation consoles.
This has allowed me to gain experience with QA support tools and develop analytic skills necessary for identification of the bugs and their causes.
By the end of my internship I even took an addditional responsibility in compiling an FAQ document after the game's release in order to address the reoccurring issues that were identified after analyzing the player feedback.
(Steam link, in case you're interested)
Scenarios
Purpose
Railway empire 2 has 14 gameplay scenarios in addition to the 5 main campaigns. This was quite the workload and considering my experience and interest in system design I took the responsibility for 2 of the scenarios.
Sitting on the Fence
The more difficult and interesting scenario of the 2 was adding a spin on the calssic RE2 gameplay loop.
The player had to join and support one of the sides during the Franco-Prussian war. The railways played an incredibly important role in Prussian victory in that conflict due to the speed that their utilizations granted to the german forces and the scenario reflected that with some of the tightest objective deadlines in the game.
Additionally, the player could also take the french side fn the conflict and be faced with simillar challenges but a few twists to keep the french playthrough separate and more challenging.
For example France at the time was a heavily centralised country and it's objectives reflect that by predominantly challenging the player to supply large quantities of materiel to and from Paris.
This changes the main challenge of the scenario from speed to traffic optimisation.
During the work on the gameplay scenarios I had received experience in the inter-discipline communication as I had request feedback and technical assistance from the narrative designer and several programmers.
Continuously updating the design documentation in order to communicate my design intent and progress was a process whose value I learned during this task.
(yes the hard way, I promise I apologized for all the confusion with the documents)
before starting the game, the players can choose a character that would lead their company. These character provided buffs and debuffs, intended to encourage the player to interact more deeply with certain mechanics in the game. They however received little attention since the start of the production phase and by my time in the studio most of them didn't play functionally any differently to each other.
Player characters
Together with the narrative designer, we created a design change proposal for every character. Keeping in mind the fact that we were proposing unplanned work, we consulted with several programmers and artists to design our changes in ways that would be simple and quick to execute and defended our case to the studio lead.
In balancing player characters we tried to fix several issues:
- Some character bonuses were connected to cut mechanics
- Characters bonuses did not create incentives to play differently depending on the character
- Not all characters' playstyles lived up to their narrative archetype
The proposed changes made it through to the release game and now can be experienced in RE2. More details can be found in this proposal document, It shows our reasoning for the changes as well as the requirements to execute them.
Special wagons is mechanics that allows the players to sacrifice a limited amount of wagons that a single locomotive can pull in exchange for some bonuses.
During my QA work I was able to completely break the game economy while using them and subsequently made a proposal for fixing them.
Special wagons
The most important balancing decision consisted of adding a price to the special wagons as before using them was an objectively better choice in every situation.
With the new price, I leveraged the limited starting cash and created a choice between a safer mixed rail line strategy and a riskier but potentially more profitable one with special wagons.
Campaign and scenario balancing
By the time I have developed a strong grasp on the game's mechanics and design intentions I started going through late campaigns and scenarios that haven't yet received many iterations. Excluding QA feedback, my input was mostly focused around reducing tedium and waiting times, as they were often caused by changes in the game's mechanics.
For example in campaign 1 I pushed to remove the business ownership from an AI rival as it made the task of "Buy out your the competitor" too tedious. Ownership of businesses plays a big role in calculating how expensive it is to buy out shares of the opponent's company.
Owned businesses in RE2 get a glowing outline next to their symbol(logs, cow, sugar). Here you see that the orange player(AI) has railroads connected to a bunch of businesses but no longer owns any of them.
The new changes in the relevant design document(highlighted in blue) that show the removal of businesses ownership
Or in campaign 2, I removed the enemy AI’s ability to sabotage the player in campaign 2, as constant harassment of the player by 3 opponents over the course of a 5-hour long campaign made the campaign an incredibly frustrating experience. This drastic measure was justified by the fact that the player has no effective countermeasures against the AI in this campaign(buying them out is not allowed) and the player’s inability to do anything significantly increased the frustration.
Though most of my work consisted of smaller scale changes.
On this screenshot, I've increased the starting population(yellow bars over the city's name) in cities of Eugene and Portland to reduce the tedium of growing the cities to achieve a strong enough economy to progress.
