Dofus: Battle 2

Presentation

Tower Attack – iOS – 2012

What I did

  • The first half of the levels, from design to implementation
  • I give a hand for designing some game mechanics

What I learned

  • Designing level for a genre I was not use to, with a slower pace and a more static aspect.
  • Using and adapting my level design knowledge.
  • How to use a iMac.

I worked as a level designer in this small team of four for this tower attack game based on Ankama’s MMORPG Dofus. The game was released for iPhone and iPad.

I was in charge of the first half of the levels for the game and because of that, I had to introduce all the important mechanisms of the game to the player.
In the game, the player plays the villain who sends his minions to fight the group of heroes preventing him from continuing his journey. Because each unit has its own capabilities, the player must carefully choose the one he wants to send to attack a hero. The minions are dumb and will just walk forward unless they encounter an obstacle, an enemy or reach the end of the map. Fortunately, the player can use special tiles that will affect not only the direction of his minions but also their health, strength or defense abilities.

The first Dofus: Battle was a tower defense and although much of its basic mechanisms were reused in Dofus: Battle 2, we had to rethink the way we built its levels, including the few constraints defined by the story: the main character has no other power but to invoke minions, but he is also the only one who can reach the gate to go to the next level.
As his invocation zone is small and situated only around him, in order to send his minions to attack inaccessible enemies, the main character had to move around the level. In this way, the player had to keep an eye on the distance between the main character and the enemies and had to think about how to clean up the level so that he could perform his actions or move around safely.

It was very interesting to work on this project, the first one on iOS for me. I could use all my knowledge to build my levels and discuss it with the game designer. I could also have a hand on one aspect of the game design as well as contribute to the design of the level building tool, along with the programmer.

Screenshots

Trailer

Manuel Utsunomiya Bonisoli ⓒNut Island Studio Powered by: Grav, Foundation 6 and the Bones theme