The Lamplighters League

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After shipping BATTLETECH as its combat and supporting systems designer, I was honored to move onto a new project as its lead in charge of concepting and prototyping combat gameplay. This project was aimed at developing a turn-based strategy game within a brand new IP, with a focus on subterfuge and setting up your enemy to fall in just the way you want them to. Years later, this project which eventually launch as The Lamplighters League.

During my time on the project, I worked to deliver iterative concepts and experiments regarding tactical combat, including sample hero characters and abilities, rudimentary in-mission systems, and wireframe progression elements in support of standing up a core game loop.

Note: Much of the below only served to inform the overall direction of the project’s continued development and changed substantially in most cases between the prototyping phase I was involved in and the game’s eventual completion.

BELOW: A photo from early paper prototyping testing; we capitalized on the cheapness and speed of this approach to rapidly flesh out early ideas before moving into the digital space.

I started out in the best way I know how to stand up ideas quickly: physical paper, pencils, dry erase markers, and board game odds and ends. Working with the creative director, I fleshed out some basic rules and we played through a few scenarios.

After some initial work in the physical space, I moved to using spreadsheets as “digital paper” to rapidly advance into experimenting with more complicated ideas. The project had no engineers yet, so the automation and calculation power of the spreadsheets was my solution to managing the friction of gameplay testing when dealing with mechanics such as hit chance, criticals, variable damage, etc.

BELOW: Various screenshots from early digital prototyping using spreadsheets as a form of design tool and rudimentary game “engine”.

Beyond playtesting, I began to setup sheets to model experiments with systems of interest around stealth, social manipulation, etc. I also brainstormed a wide variety of character archetypes and abilities for both playtesting and to help to further flesh out the overall tone of the game; many of these were used in conversation with concept art and early narrative development for world-building.

BELOW: Samples of some modeling tools I developed for testing mechanics and various brainstorming / prototyping on characters and abilities.

We eventually moved to in-engine concepting using Unity, where I worked closely with a dedicated prototyping engineer to translate findings from previous work into something more representative of eventual gameplay. A particularly noteworthy outcome of this process was my decision to integrate a real-time movement and stealth approach as a way to address the tedium of map traversal while engaging with subterfuge and attack planning – this proved to be an integral feature of the game that persisted through to its final release.

BELOW: Early graybox maps I authored in Unity to begin testing turn-based concepts gleaned from lower fidelity prototyping.

I eventually handed off my findings to the growing development team before moving back to work on BATTLETECH: Urban Warfare. I enjoyed my time in experimentation and the freedom of trying out various ideas to see what worked and what didn’t. I was excited to see the project refine itself over time and eventually release as the game we know today.