Scott Fine Game Design

Platform: iOS/Android

Engine: Unity

Tools Used: Unity, Excel, Perforce, Brick, Visual Studio (JSON), proprietary tools

Duration: 1 year

Release Date: September, 2020

Role
Detailed Info:

The economy and progression of Atari Combat: Tank Fury is my pride and joy. It consists of a 30+ tab excel sheet and countless hours of iteration, data collection from players, and input from other designers. But most of all, I think it feels really good as a player. I managed everything from the rate at which resources are accrued in the base to cost of leveling tanks up to cost of crafting consumables. It would not have been possible without the constant feedback of the amazing design team at KFF and our partners.

Base Builder Vs Battle Rewards

With any builder, we started with the base first. Once we had a pretty good idea as to what the resources were going to be, roughly how fast we wanted them to accrue in the base, what the caps would be, etc. It was time to figure out how much of the resources should come from the battles. This was tricky to balance, because battles are players engagement, they are putting effort into the battles and as such should be feeling rewarded for putting that effort forward. But if the base is paying out too little it’ll be undervalued. And players wont engage with it later on. After iterating on it over and over again we settled on a sliding scale. In the beginning the player would obtain the majority of their resources from battling. This would allow them to progress quickly and explore the various facets of our game. They would have an excellent feeling experience while onboarding. Additionally because the caps were so low the base would still feel helpful early on even though it’s not paying out quite as much as the battles. As time went on, we wanted the base to become king. So in late game the player actually is rewarded more from the base than from battles. This was particularly tricky because you don’t want the player to feel like their effort isn’t paying off but you still need to slow them down a little bit or they’ll burn through your content too quickly. Needless to say we achieved this and the resource sinks and faucets feel pretty good throughout. 

Item Crafting balancing

I particularly enjoyed balancing the requirements and the estimated values of all the craftables in Atari Combat:Tank Fury. First I’ll figure out the EVs of our basic soft currencies (Oil for base and Supply for tank progression). Once I have that figured out I start setting up my crafting tool. To figure out the EV of the individual crafting materials I based them on how often the player should receive them. How many battles would it take to receive this item? Roughly how many of this material are they supposed to receive per day so they can craft the amount of craftables we want them to in a week? Once I have all these I can combine them in my crafting tool and compare the EVs of the materials used to craft an item to set the EV of the item. This in turn also allows me to keep items from having extremely high/low requirements when they shouldn’t be. Using the EVs as a guide I can properly value and assign appropriate requirements to the craftables in relation to one another.

Disclaimer: the amazing art was created by the art team at KFF.