https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aav1kYogYBw&feature=youtu.be

SPIRIT RUSH
- Capture points to dominate the map, completing the ritual open the winning portal
- Use abilities and skill shots to get ahead
- Fight 1v1 against your friends
Spirit Rush was a game developed for the Global Game Jam 2016 on the theme – Ritual.
Spirit Rush is a couch co-op battle arena game based on capturing objectives before your opponent to win. Players have abilities that they can use to hinder their opponents progress and use to get ahead including: freeze, spirit block, spirit bomb and spirit dash. The player who captures their assigned shrines (objectives) first completes the ritual and opens a portal (final goal) to the next realm to win.
MY ROLE
- Level design – objective placement for optimized game flow and battle arena multiplayer balancing.
- Mechanic design – player abilities – spirit dash, bomb, freeze, and block
- Play testing and ability balancing – cool down timing, blast radius’s, damage etc.
As the only designer on the team it was my job to concept and flesh out the idea for the theme of the game jam. Once finalised my primary job was to design the multiplayer level and player abilities. The level design went through a few iterations through play testing several times by my self and with my teammates. The main issue of the level design was that players wouldn’t interact with each other very much as they were so focused on getting the objectives. Shown further below is a video of an old build displaying this problem. To combat this I redesigned the map to be longer with 4 objectives either side, with mandatory objectives on the opposite side of the bottle neck so players are forced to pass each other resulting in combat. I then added 4 new spawn points closer to the capture points and didn’t allow players to spirit dash through the two central blocks next to the portal so the game was more balanced and competitive.
Some of the skills and abilities shown in the older build are very unbalanced and not very exciting. For example the freeze is a one button press and there is no skill involved when casting it. So we decided to make all abilities skill shots for a more competitive and exciting game play experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v28EGS17ZTw&feature=youtu.be



