Junkers: Some Assembly Required

All the strategy… in half the time!

Junkers: Some Assembly Required

Junkers: Some Assembly Required is a hybrid CCG/strategy game developed by a team of 13 graduate students over 8 months between January of 2015 to August of 2015, at which time we successfully published the game to the iPad App Store.

I served as the Lead Designer on the team, leading a team of 4 designers and driving the design vision of the project throughout it’s development period. Inheriting a pitch “demo” of the game idea, I was responsible for translating that rough concept into a streamlined mobile experience, delivering the complete CCG/strategy game experience (our internal descriptor was X-Com Jr. meets Hearthstone) in game sessions that were targeted to be 20 minutes or less.

My contributions to the game’s design included fleshing out core mechanics and systems such as unit movement, attacking, abilities & card designs, and card activation in-game. For the first couple months of the project as we fleshed out our vertical slice and iterated on our core game experience, I documented these systems using visual one-page documents (see some examples below!) that could be easily deciphered by engineers and artists to help bring those systems to life.

Later in the project I became more involved in the layout design of not only the actual field of play but also in laying out the surrounding arena and all of its various props, first by using proxy assets I created in Maya, then integrating final 3D assets created by the artists on the team. I was responsible for creating a performant game level within Unity, which I accomplished by combining the entire scene into a unified mesh and baking the lighting information. This provided the boost we needed to get the game running well enough on the iPad to pass Apple’s certification.

Outside of the realm of design, becoming involved with the art pipeline in this way led me to finding a more efficient way to import new art assets into the game as needed, reducing our integration time from ~90 minutes per asset down to 15. I was also responsible for setting up the animation state-machines for all player-controllable units and implementing visual polish elements such as blob shadows to increase visual fidelity. I even had the opportunity to modify a built-in Unity shader by disabling backface culling in order to properly display some of our simplest 3D assets. This had a negligible hit on performance, meaning no rework was needed on those assets.

This project required me to perform the duties of several disciplines ranging from technical design, to technical art, level design, systems design, creative leadership and more, and proved to be an incredible first step on my game development career journey.

Screenshots

One-page Design Examples