Clawface
- Role
- Lead Game Designer
- Platform
- Windows, Mac, Linux
- Tools
- Unity
Summary
Clawface is a twin-stick bullet hell shooter. I designed the weapon functions and balance, enemy AI behavior and dynamic level design, and was creative director for a team of 18, keeping one consistent vision from pre-production to release while hitting multiple deadlines.
Full write-up: Solving the Combat Design Puzzle of Clawface, on Medium.
Gameplay
Depth from limited scope
- The scope was small, so the combat had to get depth from a few pieces. I built reusable pieces that combine into many permutations: the weapons, a dynamic level system and the enemies, with enemy color swaps as one example of reuse.
- A score-driven leaderboard gave players a reason to keep playing for the top spot.
Six weapons, any two at once
- Players dual-wield any two of six weapons, which supports different skill levels and preferences. Harder-to-use weapons reward skill with high damage.
- The set: Blaster (rapid fire, small hitbox), Boomerang (bounces off walls), Geyser (high damage, slow), LightningGun (chains between targets), Missile (explosive splash) and SpreadGun (strong up close, weak at range).
- Melee weapons and reloading were tested and then cut for concepts players understand immediately.
- About a month after release, analytics showed almost an even spread of use across the weapons.
Keeping players moving
- The goal was constant movement and chained kills, and the risk was players kiting enemies around the arena. Some enemies explode near the player and the Red Bouncer damages on contact, which pushes players to keep moving.
- To balance that, an enemy below a health threshold becomes stunned. The player can move in and eat it to recover health. Stunned enemies explode after about 3 seconds and take the health with them.
- Eating raises the combo multiplier by 2x instead of 1x, so players going for the leaderboard eat enemies even at full health.
- Levels change mid-wave. Each tile is a pit (projectiles pass, characters cannot), a floor (both pass) or a wall (neither), so intensity rises and falls.
Balancing eat, dash and shoot
- Eating became multi-directional after testing showed players had to think too hard about facing direction. A failed eat locks out dash and shoot, which stops button spamming.
- The continuous 0 to 100 percent health bar was too vague in the chaos. I switched to 9 discrete units: eating recovers 1 and getting hurt costs 3. Difficulty levels can change just those values.
- Players lost track of their aim with mouse and keyboard, so each weapon got a small laser line.
- Dash was the main way to avoid damage, so players can dash while shooting or eating. Cooldown and distance were tuned up to release.
- My takeaway: tiny changes can have huge effects on the player experience.