Jordan Koruntoff

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Project Titan – Game Design

Project Titan is a 3rd person mech arena shooter featuring sleek gunplay and devastating heroic abilities.

I worked on Project Titan as a senior designer for 2 years. The project has yet to be released.

As senior designer on Project Titan I led the efforts on characters, combat, systems, and moment-to-moment gameplay along with minor duties doing QA, and social media strategy.

Some of my duties included:

• Designing all playable hero mechs
• Designing the core systems, and combat mechanics
• Implementing regular balance changes
• Leading team playtests
• Prototyping new ability and gun ideas in blueprints
• Mentoring jr designers
• QA

Overall my time was spent focusing on creating the foundational systems and mechs that the game needed to succeed and then diving directly into google sheets to balance, tweak and tune until it all felt great to play with!

Project Titan Design

Project Titan has many areas of design I could speak about however due to NDA I cannot reveal any of the up to date documents or info, but can share some of the earlier works I’ve done for characters, systems, and mechanics.

Mech Archetypes

Mech designs were split up into different archetypes that would dictate their intended playstyle, base stats, and what style of abilities would be designed for them such as the “ranger” mechas that focused on weapons, offense, and mobility.

This process aimed to accomplish 2 things; streamline mech design allowing jr designers or even non designers to more easily pitch entire designs, and provide a way to discuss what archetype of mech is serving which player identity.

Once implemented we found that the team did submit more designs that were more cohesive, and it became easier to talk about what archetype of mech was serving which player identity.

Failed Design – Heat System

The heat system aimed to provide a clear flow to the combat and a skill vector players could get better at by asking them to have to manage an ever increasing bar during the heat of combat that had a significant punishment if the player failed to juggle it correctly.

Once the heat system was implemented and thoroughly playtested we found it fell short of our expectations – while it did accomplish its goal of forcing the player to not spam their abilities mindlessly it also became very difficult to keep track of during combat resulting in players feeling like losing access to their abilities was a “bug”, as well as situations occurring where both players fighting would overheat at the same time resulting in a wet noodle fight.

While the mechanic was a failure overall it provided excellent learnings into what makes Project Titan fun which was focusing on the fast paced gameplay rather than trying to slow it down, future designs would focus on rewarding players for timing abilities correctly rather than punishing those who spammed.

Mech Design

Ephemera was one of the 3 premier mechs I designed that resulted in increased investor funding.

She was designed with the idea of an agile and flashy twin pistol user in the vein of a character like Lucian from League of Legends.

Visually we wanted her to be very sleek with both sharp edges and flowing curves to accentuate the idea of her being physically frail but offensively lethal.

She would routinely be praised as many players favorite character during playtests and received some of the least revisions during production.

Ability Design

I designed Ephemera’s with agility and delayed payoff in mind – the longer she could stay alive in a fight the greater threat she posed, but her low defensive stats (health, defense) were at odds with that goal which is where her abilities came in.

Ephemera’s abilities were designed to encourage her to weave in and out of combat, with her passive providing a cushion for players who made a mistake, her suit passive allowing her to take engagements for longer, and her ability 1 allowing her to move quickly throughout the battlefield to dodge attacks and disorient foes.

If the player successfully mastered the defensive side of her kit, the reward was a very potent offensive kit with her ability 2 providing her extra overdrive charge allowing her to cast it quicker, and the overdrive itself being her ultimate ability where she could store up to 6 overdrive charges and then unleash them all at once to devastating effect laying waste to the battlefield with a laser barrage.

Overall Ephemera’s kit ended up being a stand out in testing and one we confidently moved forward with.