Deadwood is a twin-stick, top-down shooter where you control a large stone golem and a brave wood-ling as they shoot and smash their way through hordes of undead

Role: Level Designer

Responsibilities:

• Implemented satisfying gameplay through combat design
• Scripted elimination, defense, and story objectives
• Coordinated with QA to document bugs and ensure levels were bug-free
• Set dressed large, outdoor environments

Combat Design

When designing deadwood encounters, I did so while abiding the following elements:

1) Player Abilities

The player can use devastating melee attacks that can one-shot weaker enemies

Therefore, spawning clusters of Sprouts (weaker enemies) gives the player a chance to feel powerful by Hulk-smashing lots of enemies

2) Layout & Topography

Leveraging chokepoints to funnel enemies and pick them off

Elevation creates opportunities for more diverse combat scenarios

Frequency: the occurrence of enemies throughout the level

Intensity: the number and difficulty level of each kind of enemy

Duration: combat could range anywhere from 5 second encounters, to minute long-skirmishes, to multi-minute swarms

3) Combat Pacing

A) Initial wave of fodder enemies distract the player

B) After a brief delay, secondary wave catches up to do heavier damage

(Meat shields supporting ranged enemies)

As a way to have coherent method for combat design in Curse of the Deadwood, I took inspiration from military field tactics for a few reasons:

This is a top-down game, thus it was natural to overlay military flanking and offensive maneuvers with the level design and enemy spawner placement.
The Deadwood (bad guys) are an invading horde trying to stop Lathe (wooden guy) and Roguard (the big stone guy), so it seemed prudent to treat the horde like a large enemy force trying to ambush and surround the player.

Below are a few of the military field tactics I used in the combat design.

The pincer movement

According to Wikipedia:

A full pincer movement leads to the attacking army facing the enemy in front, on both flanks, and in the rear.
If attacking pincers link up in the enemy's rear, the enemy is encircled. Such battles often end in surrender or destruction of the enemy force, but the encircled force can try to break out.
They (the enemy) can attack the encirclement from the inside to escape...

To implement a pincer movement formation I had to:

create chokepoint in the level
add a trigger volume at a spot where the player can be trapped by geometry or pitfalls on one side, and enemies on the other sides
add enemy spawners some distance from the narrow sides of the trigger

Once the player walks into the trigger volume, enemies will spawn, forming a wall on either side of the player, thus creating a pincer where the player has to fight their way out.

Enemy Spawners

Combat Trigger

The Player

Result

Hammer & Anvil

According to Wikipedia:

"The hammer and anvil is a military tactic involving the use of two primary forces, one to pin down an enemy, and the other to smash or defeat the opponent with an encirclement maneuver. It may involve a frontal assault by one part of the force, playing a slower-moving or more static role."

To implement a hammer and anvil ambush:

create or find a chokepoint in the level
add a trigger volume at a spot somewhat ahead of the chokepoint, along the level's critical path
at the chokepoint, add stationary enemies (the anvil) that guard the chokepoint and punish the player if they get too close
a few paces beyond the trigger volume, add spawners comprising a mobile cluster of enemies (the hammer) that will push forward, trapping the player.

Stationary melee enemies sealing chokepoint

Mobile Enemies

The Player