DREAD IT - Combat

DREAD IT is founded on tense thrill. The combat system was designed to encourage strategy, careful planning, and tight execution. The goal of the game was to make the player think about every action and feel any small mistake would get them killed. The stress of planning every last detail with a high chance of everything falling apart was intended to put the player in a similar headspace to Peggy, the player character.

As the lead systems designer, I was in charge of designing the core gameplay loop. In order to create tension and stress, I had to really place myself inside the shoes of a new player all the time. My goal was to create a combat system that evoked a strong feeling from the player more than one that required a lot of technical skill to overcome the challenges.

The most important part of this game is understanding the monster's behavior, so that you can plan a route and account for the monster's path. Knowing the enemy's behavior is critical to the core gameplay loop, so I had to design it to be easily understandable by the player. I designed its behavior for a behavior tree and worked with multiple programmers on the team to implement it as best as we could. 

The player has very little control over the flow of combat once the monster is active in the level, only able to use various traps to slow down the monster. I designed the systems for which the player places traps, how traps interact with both the player and the monster, and how traps interact with each other and the environment. There was far more design work I did that never ended up in the final version of the game, especially in making many traps that could lead to creating Rube Goldberg style combos.