Saleblazers
Build a shop and survive a perilous open world with up to 8 friends in the ultimate multiplayer shopkeeping survival experience!
I spent three months in the summer of 2022 working with the Saleblazers team at Airstrafe Interactive doing design work for player minigames, resource balancing, and the core shopkeeping loop.
Game Details
Game developed in Unity
Programming Languages: C#
Platform: PC
Genre: Survival
Made by Airstrafe Interactive
My Responsibilities Included:
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Communicating with other departments to bring art and audio into Unity editor
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Collaboration with QA department to incorporate player feedback into design decisions
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Maintaining design documentation
Fishing Minigame
Our team wanted the fishing minigame to be challenging, but rewarding for players who had invested their skill points into fishing. Working with existing design documentation, I created a minigame in which the player must follow the fish with their bobber is it swims around the screen. The speed of the fish, the length of time the player has to catch it, and the size of the bobber are all dependent on the player's fishing skill value.
Lockpicking Minigame
When creating the lockpicking game, I wanted to give an advantage to players who took the time to closely study the minigame, as well as include an audio component, since I feel that is an important part of real-world lockpicking that is often left out of video game recreations. My solution was a system that increased the pitch and volume of tumblers turning as the rings the player was attempting to line up got closer to each other. My personal challenge I set for myself was to make the distinction clear enough that a skilled player could even complete the minigame without seeing the lock they were picking.
Systems Balancing and Testing
In collaboration with the QA department, one of my responsibilities was the balancing and testing of the game's core shopkeeping systems. To do this, we outlined the central loop of actions we wanted players to follow, and used this information to set the number of resources needed to craft items and the amount that players could sell them for. From here, we observed playtests run by the QA department and used the player feedback to adjust the values to further encourage fun gameplay and an engaging core loop.
Sound Design
In addition to my design work. I also participated in the sound design and implementation for large portions of the game. My work included designing sound effects for enemy encounters, player weapons, resource gathering, and the skill check minigames. I also worked with the team's composer to develop a series of scripts that we could use to handle multiple sound effects and adjust their pitch, volume, and location according to our needs.