Jordan Koruntoff

Godfall – Game Design

Godfall was a PS5 launch title released on November 12, 2020

Overview

As the combat, enemy and moment to moment designer on Godfall my duties included:

  • Being the owner/vision holder for enemy design and combat
  • Combat scenario set-up and tuning
  • Designing new enemies
  • Moment to moment gameplay tuning
  • Light blueprint work
  • System design
  • QA

Overall, my time was largely spent designing new enemies, implementing them into the world,

tuning all of their various attributes and attack patterns, and crafting the combat scenarios.

Tribal Design

Godfall had a large number of enemies to design, iterate and tune and focused on “tribal” encounters

rather than individual threats to pressure the player and the design was based around 4 key rules:

  1. Each tribe should present a unique challenge the player has to face
  2. Tribal abilities should serve a way to reinforce the desired play pattern against the tribe
  3. Difficulty of enemies should be through their attack patterns, not their stats
  4. Combat should resolve within 15-30s to keep the pace snappy and active

Using the Decimus tribe I designed as an example of these rules below

Decimus is a lethal warrior who commands the undead called Ironbloods.

Ironbloods will be periodically resummoned after a set period of time unless Decimus is defeated

If the player opts to not kill the Ironbloods and focus Decimus instead, the Ironbloods have dashing attacks

that can cause the player to stagger, opening themselves up to Decimus’s very lethal attacks.

This design caused the player to have to make a series of choices around the risk/reward of killing Ironbloods

or attempting to rush Decimus himself down and risk being staggered into chopped up by Decimus.

Some more of Godfalls tribal designs can be found here:

Tribal Designs

Enemy Design/Tuning

Each enemy went through a rigorous design and testing process that involved a number of steps

  1. Design the visual aspects of each enemy working heavily with the art team
  2. Design any special features or mechanics such as the Vargul Enforcer getting a new set of attacks once it’s health reached 50%
  3. Design the attacks – how they would look, the angle of attack, how fast, etc
  4. Implement everything into engine and assess
  5. After assessment begin tuning – tuning largely consisted of modifying a number of attributes
    • Hitboxes
    • weakpoint location & quantity
    • attack frequency, cooldowns, and weighting
    • basic attributes like health, damage, etc
    • Motion warping, attack hitboxes, enemy hurtboxes etc
  6. After tuning was complete for the whole tribe, creating procedural generation camp configurations that they could spawn from
  7. Placing spawn markers around the map for where I wanted combat encounters to take place
  8. Test and tune the full map/mission/combat encounters until the desired gameplay result was achieved

All of our combat encounters were set-up with procedural generation in mind and the google sheet we used to create encounters and export from was created by myself and another team member.

The example document can be found here:

Godfall Encounters

Mission Design

When I had some extra time between enemy designs I also helped with the mission design and set-up, below is a flexible mission act that I designed for an early part of the game against the Vargul tribe:

Flexible Mission Acts