Full Metal Alchemist

Primary Developer Primarily Team of 1 January 2019 - Present

Occasionally Team of 2 (Various work periods)

Warcraft 3 Mod

Link to discord for the game where you can contact me and download the game!

Overview

Full Metal Alchemist, an asymmetrical MOBA game, requires the good guys team of 5-7 players to use teamwork to fight the more powerful evil team heroes of 2-4 players. If the good guys team has not killed all evil player characters and their NPC Father by one hour into the game, the NPC will destroy all terrain starting with the outer edges, and the evil team will automatically win the game.

Full Metal Alchemist was the focal point of my hobby of developing maps for Warcraft 3. It drew in a large following with a Discord server of over 200 members. It was enjoyed by many players, who regularly expressed their opinions on balance and game direction. Although I developed the map predominantly as a solo developer, there have been periods of a few months where one person assisted me, primarily in the design of the terrain.

Skills Honed

Systems Design

Balancing

Javascript

Adapting Existing IP

UX

Character Design

Systems Design

Stopping Griefing

Map Design

Accomplishments

Designed 38 MOBA characters with 5+ moves on each character.
Designed asymmetrical MOBA requiring one side of 2-3 more powerful evil characters to play against
5-7 weaker good characters.
Designed and placed strategically dispersed objectives to encourage conflict and competition for completion.
Balanced 38 opposing characters based on informed decisions from data of hundreds of games.
Intentionally designed map layout and locations of monster creep camps to create a good balance of grinding spots, purposely increasing player conflict and interaction.
Extensively animated 3D imported models.
Balanced characters in response to collected data from hundreds of games.

DATA CHART

Design Work

Making an asymmetrical game fun for all, not just the stronger side

In heavily asymmetrical games such as Dead by Daylight or Dragonball Breakers, players by default always want to play as the more powerful characters. This was originally also a problem for Full Metal Alchemist, but I worked the design to change that. Both sides became fun and engaging to play, rather than the good team merely serving as punching bags for the evil team. I definitely kept the evil team much stronger as the primary appeal of the asymmetry, but I also greatly reduced frustrations for the good team players.

Eliminating punishment for bad players The most obvious change needed in the early game versions was the possible downward spiral past the point of recovery through the extreme consequence losing progress and being de-leveled when dying. To remove this severe punishment, I replaced it with a reward of gold for players killing others. Of course, players don't want the enemy to get gold, but it doesn’t hurt as much as losing your own progress. In addition, the remaining possibility of killing the evil NPC despite any large gold stockpiles gave hope and motivation to those who died repeatedly. To provide the evil team with engagement, I added killing the radio tower as an objective for them. It was always intended to be a very easy thing to accomplish and had low impact on the game, but it provided incentives for evil players to enter good territory. The original reward was inconsequential for skilled players as it merely removed the ability for good players to share vision with each other. With good communication, the loss of vision was easily circumvented. Yet, this was much too punishing for bad players, so it was modified to leaking chat logs of the good team to the evil team. Bad players generally do not talk, so it did not matter to them, and good players could speak in code to overcome it.

Minimizing player griefing potential Most of the players of my game would advocate for balance from a purely 100% competitive standpoint among the best players, ignoring balance otherwise. However, focusing on competitive play would neglect the new and less skilled players. The most vocal players of the game would say that so long as it was competitive, it shouldn't change, but some of these players just enjoyed inflicting misery on others. I learned that I needed to ignore them. Pride was a character who was better off staying in weaker states, because the expert griefer players would abuse him if he became stronger. Pride was an extreme snowball character, either winning in a landside or getting slaughtered. In reworking his abilities, I weakened his lifesteal and increased his durability so that he couldn't be abused. In this way, he was neither so vulnerable when under control of bad players, nor scalable to infinity and invincibility in the hands of good players. There are two ways for the evil team to win the game. The primary way, stalling the game for an hour so Father wins on the appointed day, provides an exciting conclusion with everyone fighting in the middle. It is one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. The second way for the evil team to win at any time was killing Winry, and thus stopping alchemists from respawning at death. Toxic players especially enjoyed watching opponents whine as this occurred. After much debate revealed the motives of vocal toxic players, it became obvious that this heavy punishment for bad players who left Winry unattended needed to change. Making it almost impossible to kill her, has made that method a last resort for the evil team, although it still provides hope in edge case scenarios.

Balancing around permanent death

Permanent death was a strong identity aspect of the game in adapting the source material. The homunculi can each lose 5 lives, but after that they stay dead. Balancing around this limitation was always a central issue for the map. Unless the game has progressed nearly to the climatic finish, the game ends as soon as one of the homunculi is permanently killed. The simple solution would have been to eliminate permanent death, but as one of the core aspects of the game that players enjoyed, I took action to make it work. This choice made the game feel like a better adaption to the series.

Designing characters with limited lives All homunculi characters are either extremely durable or mobile, or in the most extreme case of Sloth, both. I intentionally gave many skills for both movement and blocking damage to homunculi characters but not to good team characters. This enabled the homunculi to escape situations where they could be killed, especially early in the game. Because these characters are the stars of the game, they were the ones who had more than 5 abilities in most cases. As one of only a few members of an evil team, homunculi still needed to be able to contribute to team fights offensively rather than merely survive. Yet because the evil team is on defense and wins by default, simply surviving also worked into their playstyle.

Limitations from the source material Homunculi on the good team proved a separate problem. Characters on the good team are expected to die more often as they are weak, so characters with limited lives on that faction were at severe risk. I couldn't simply eliminate homunculi on the good team due to adapting the source material, so instead I opted to make them more powerful in comparison to regular good team characters, while limiting their number to one per team.

Making in-game objectives impactful but not game ending Players could also pick from humans on the evil team despite most of their team being made up of homunculi. Evil humans revive at the doctor NPC when they are killed. These characters could respawn infinitely if the doctor survived, so successful games where the evil team picked all human characters often resulted in the doctor never dying. This proved very boring as the doctor was expected to die in basically every game. If he didn't die, evil dominated the game and good team players felt totally defeated. On the other hand, an evil team made up of humans relied extensively on the doctor, making for very one-sided games when players chose this team composition. Unlike Winry, the nearly invincible character who respawned players on the good team, Winry, the doctor’s death dying was an extremely regular part of the game flow. I couldn't just make killing him be a last resort. I solved this dilemma by allowing evil humans to respawn even when the doctor died; however, they did lose several levels. Characters on the evil team are generally much too strong to be bullied down and killed multiple times, so this did not become as much of an issue. Instead, my solution allowed the death of the doctor NPC to not be quite as centralizing.

Stopping the turtling of a team that wins by doing nothing

The evil team, especially when playing a team with homunculi characters rather than humans, are intended to win the game by stalling for the promised day. They have many incentives to defend their base including limited lives, and a desire to protect Cray and the Doctor for as long as possible. Naturally, this leads to many games where the evil team turtles or never leaves their base which results in somewhat dull gameplay states where evil players are just waiting to win.

Giving players a grace period The obvious remedy was to increase the difficulty of killing NPCs for the first 20 minutes of gameplay with temporary increase durability. With that change, the evil team did not need to constantly worry about protecting them and could venture out of its base during the initial phase. It remained possible to kill the NPCs early in some extreme cases, but all the evil players needed to be far away from home for that to happen.

Incentivizing player activity with objectives Many intentional design decisions were made to increase the engagement of the teams. The biggest mechanic making players fight each other is the spawning of bosses at random, with the game broadcasting a new boss location every 5 minutes of game time. These bosses drop valuable items, and by collecting enough of them, players can form the philosopher's stone. Although the location is random, the areas around both bases are no spawning zones so as not to give any unfair advantages to either team. These stones are quite enticing to the evil team as they can each provide 5 additional lives to homunculi or revive the doctor. Although the good team can buff their own stats by getting a stone, its motivation is mainly to deny that stone to the evil team. It is much easier for the good team to kill bosses for two reasons. First, the good team isn’t as burdened by defending their NPCs. Second, they are much more likely to be able to spread out and be close to a spawning boss simply because there are more good players on a team. In contrast, evil players must put their NPCs at risk to contest bosses. These are all intentional design decisions. Two bosses drop powerful items which do not spawn randomly and are always in the same locations. Because they are so strong, it is difficult for the evil team to kill them during the first 20 minutes while their NPCs are harder to kill. If they fail at this, these bosses and their rewards will usually be forfeited to the good team. As it becomes obvious that a spawning boss will be won by one team, the opposing team can opt for these stationary bosses, which provide some protection against bad luck with the spawning bosses.

Letting players cut their losses One of the evil NPCs, Cray, can be escorted to a laboratory and sacrificed, turning into half a philosopher's stone. If he dies, the evil team can no longer buy upgrades, but if he's going to die anyway it's better to make good use of him. This requires the evil team to leave the base and escort him to the lab. It also risks the good team taking the shards if evil players are not careful. This allows a team relying on Cray to not have to commit to defending him less. This is turn allows them to move out of the base for a high stakes and exciting moment of gameplay.

Breaking stalemates In the interest of stopping games where evil team NPCs never die, a mechanic was added where the good team can hire mercenaries with gold to kill these NPCs. Although evil team players can defend against mercenary attacks, the Doctor and Cray are far enough apart that it can be difficult to defend them both simultaneously, often forcing the surrender of one of them. Evil players just cowering in their base will not notice mercenaries being hired until they have already entered their base. This also encourages them to be out engaging in combat more often.

Reworking the terrain with an artist

The main purpose of collaboration on this project was terrain rework. I let them handle it while continuing to update the current map with existing terrain, not paying it much mind and letting this person do what they wanted as I continued to update non-terrain based mechanics.

The problem I did not discuss design principles with this artist nearly as much as I should have, which ultimately led to a "bigger is better" approach from them. The map size increased massively, over six times as big. This ultimately resulted in a lot of big empty spaces filled with nothing, and increased the travel time to walk anywhere to a ridiculous extent. At the time, I figured I would alleviate this by increasing the movement speed of all characters, but this was not enough. Even with movement speed nearly doubled, all the gameplay time was now spent walking. With this movement speed increase, it had now become far too easy to escape from players, making it impossible for players to kill each other. The random boss spawns were now almost impossible to contest due to the giant space of the map, with them automatically going to whoever spawned next to them.

The solution After a couple of updates to this giant version of the map, it became clear that this map could not be salvaged. Regretfully, I reverted to the previous map and had my artist begin another rework while being much more involved in the process for a much smaller terrain. I made it clear to value the work they had put in and included what good new areas from the larger terrain rework wherever possible, taking the good while getting rid of the unnecessary, bloated content. I helped the artist add more places to navigate more easily. Most notably we added two extra entrances into the evil team's base. This made it easier for the evil team to leave the base without constantly needing to defend it. It also helped alleviate congestion of the key points in the evil base, making it easier to kill evil team NPCs even when the evil players refused to leave the base.

Post Mortem

Things that went right ◉ This was a very faithful adaption of the source material that fans of the series greatly enjoyed. ◉ Players enjoyed the feeling of power on the more powerful evil team and liked overcoming these powerful characters when on the good team. ◉ I kept players moving on the map contesting objectives and fighting each other as much as possible.

Things that went Wrong ◉ I should have realized more quickly that toxic players who wanted everything to be hypercompetitive at the cost of new players were bad for the community and not designed things for them. I did eventually figure it out. ◉ I should have been more involved with the terrain rework to begin with so that I did not need to waste so much of the artist's time.

What I've learned from this experience ◉ Griefers are very useful for playtesting, but that doesn't mean you should listen to everything they say! ◉ Game balance should not be entirely focused on competitive players. It can be skewed if some things are too frustrating for casual players or too difficult to learn. ◉ Methods of designing things to manipulate player behavior and incentivize them towards objectives. ◉ Design of characters for many different player archetypes. ◉ Minimally punish players and offer comeback opportunities from boring game states caused by one player decisively dominating the game. These rebound opportunities don’t need to be handouts, but can give struggling players options to earn their way back into a position with possibilities for victory. I do everything in my power to keep the game from becoming pointless and boring. ◉ I gained quite a bit of experience with adapting characters from source materials and staying true to them. This can be important because every character has their fans, no matter how obscure.