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SIEGE ROYALE

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ROLE

Game, Combat, Systems & Level Designer

DESCRIPTION

Siege Royale is a First Person Perspective, range combat focused medieval Battle Royale.

This project started as a University Game Design Document project where resources were unlimited and it was about seeing what we could design in 6 weeks.

For this Project i set myself incredibly high expectations as I wanted to push myself during my final year at AIE whilst i was in the safety of the classroom.

This project was continued for a time as a personal project as I wanted to go more in depth an scientific in my design methods for the game.

YEAR

2021-2022

GENRE

Multiplayer Battle Royale

PLATFORM

Theoretical
- PC (Windows)
- Console

PROJECT TYPE

Solo University Project

Continued as Personal Project

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GAME DESIGN

On this page I will discuss the Game Design choices that I made as part of Game Design Document for 2nd Year University at AIE Melbourne as well as the choices I made on this concept as part of a personal and starting as a team based side project before moving over to another concept.

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Core Game Mechanics

Loot Mechanics

Paper Prototyping

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I used a lot of paper prototyping to help me get a better understanding of how the looting and rarity of loot would work.

 

I started by creating decks of cards with all of the available items in the loot table, from the weapons to consumables like arrows. I then had multiple game session as a D&D-like dungeon master knowing where the crates and loot were located whilst players searched for loot for several turns. 

 

Whilst this isn't a perfect approximation of how looting works in a BR game it allowed me to see any glaring issues in my inital arbitary percentages and refine them over multiple sessions and variations to get a system that would have been a good place to begin with in an actual prototype build.

 

One of the things I noticed was that ammo didn't spawn with weapons if it was only coming as separate possibility in the loot pool. This meant I had to make sure you got at least some ammunition with any weapon that needed it but that ammo could still be picked up by players who only needed the ammo.

The fact that I had crates with different rarities also meant that they had a higher chance of drawing high tier loots meant that I had to create multiple piles and depending on the crate a player would open they would draw a number of cards from specific decks to simulate the higher chances of getting a rarer card.

 

This system was a decent first attempt but after working out the percentages per pile and their drop chances overall I determined that for an individual item these were correct but each high tier crate you opened had an inflated chance of higher loot overall using this system and that in playtesting competitors of this game that hadn't been my experience. 

This lead me to have different decks for each crate rarity which allowed me better control over what the chance of drawing items were from that crate rarity.

One of the other realisations I had during my initial prototyping was that the loot pool percentages were changing each time a card was removed from the deck, so instead of keeping cards we had to write down our loot and reshuffle the deck every time a single card got drawn, which did increase the play test session times but allowed me to see when items were dropping at higher rates that I'd have expected.

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LIVE SERVICE DESIGN

CONTINUATION & NEXT STEPS

Battlepass Upgrade & Better Calculation of Value

When I returned to the concept i went in for a more granular approach to how much value is in a typical battlepass.

 

So I went through multiple games and recorded the varieties/value of the pass with the Warzone battlepasses showing variance per season.

 

I then restructured my initial battlepass using lessons from the data I'd gathered and what I felt was right for the price i'd set for it.

SiegeRoyal Seaon Rarity Calculations 001.png

I also started to add into my overall plan for each season, how the map would expand, what new features would be added and how to make sure we don't suddenly jump ship and loose the core of the design (like adding magic season 2 would drastically change the game).

I also had to factor in MTX bundles that would match each season and extra cosmetics for in season events/rewards etc.

I felt this was a really good test for me to see the big picture when designing a game for commercial success without penny pinching players at every available opportunity. The design intent was always for a balanced and fair system, with reasonable prices and not full of filler content that you will never use or care about.

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Seasonal Content Overhaul

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Coming back to this project after many years of the battle pass and season content cycle for shooters I was getting fatigued at a few areas of their implementation and wanted to see if it was possible to fix it.

 

The first was the fact you had to keep playing the game or miss out which for someone who grew up on collectathons the game dies once i can;t have something i want anymore but i also have a life to live and sometime you just don;t have time, have more important things or a new game you want to play comes out but returning to and old fling now feels dirty and even if you've put in hundreds of hours you're not out of the loop and missed out. The same if i'm late to a game but really enjoying it, once I hit max rank on the battlepass whats that extra hook to keep me playing?

 

The solution was simple, allow players to work on battlepasses they own, even if the season is over and for limited time events, promise the community to hold second chance events where players can work toward rewards they missed out on.

 

With this aspect of the battlepass system resolved in my mind I started to look at the way content cycles happen, it's either all at once and then fast for forever or small chunks pumped out so often you can't keep up and nothing feels like you can truly sink your teeth into it. Also the lack of communication surrounding events and when they will be, the rewards and what they are seems to be severely underused. Why not hype up content and keep player engaged until the next drop instead of guessing or relying on leaks?

With this in mind i set out the above roadmap for season one with smaller events with rewards and limited time modes which would eventually be used in Warzone and other battle royales shortly after I had decided on that plan of attack.

This first season was set around fire so weapons, weapon mods, locations and even the events were themed around the idea of fire. I thought this was a good idea of the kind of content level I think is needed for a live service of this nature to keep larger player engagements but be friendly to people who need to come and go due to life.

Making that much would be expensive... and likely need to be done in advance of launch for season 1.

Prototyping, Hiatus & Current Status

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I started to prototype this and learn UE5's World Partition system so that I could build the level design in the world.

I spoke with my favourite weapon artist and we agreed we should work together again and were set to start out on this but literally days into this I realised the better idea was to get a group of people who like working together and work on a project together.

At this point I know there was some apprehension about the BR space as it reached over-saturation and some apathy from my game dev mates who had been hearing about this idea for a while at this point so I instead pitch them another idea, Project Siren and this was put on ice.

Whilst Project Siren (some of which is seen to the left), was ultimately put on hiatus itself for it being well and truly outside scope once we'd done a years worth of learning the engine and the pre-production for a prototype it was still a good idea to move to another project, we just moved to the wrong one and have corrected that for 2024.

I would like to come back to this, bet it as a personal project for myself or if we have some success and decide the time is right to bring this back into the light.

I think at that time I'd have to reevaluate what new innovations have been added/are expected in new games in the BR space but there isn't anything that fills the niche this game would so it's never too far from my mind and is on the "if I win lotto i'm bring it back with avengeance" list.

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