The project

I arrived on Vampire the masquerade: Swansong at an advanced state of production. I came to help the only Game Designer on the project for 6 months and ended up finishing the game as solo Designer myself.

That led me to own quite a number of subjects and features, but also to handle new responsabilites like communication with outsourcing companies, twitch extension developers, licence owners and editors.

Game Design

Swansong had most of its features already designed when I came. My main tasks were to try and fix some issues (like having too many skills which led to a large discrepancy of value between them).

I fused some Skills under a shared label when they were coherent. I updated some of the "Disciplines" (vampire abilities) to reduce frustration of high cost and low value. Some others I created with tools we already had in the game.
For balancing purposes, I gathered data all around the game's levels and rationalized difficulties for checks and dialogue versus, collaborating closely with each quest designer.

I also worked on some parts of the design still untouched like Traits, Talents and Achievements. One of the hardest subjects I worked on was the tutorials since we didn't have much time to iterate and had to be quick.