I was given the following goals for the dazzling system in Peridot:

• Fun, intuitive gameplay

• Non-violent, skill-based combat

• Under 30 second sessions

• Utilize the player Peridot’s level and traits

• The player is “healing” a Feral Peridot that was infected by a mysterious green Blight

In order to keep it intuitive, I wanted to adapt one of our existing mechanics into this new combat system.

Our players really enjoy Foraging, a circle drawing mechanic where players can harvest fruits from trees, water, etc.

I found a great reference in the Pokemon Ranger games, where they leverage circle-drawing with a Stylus as a combat mechanic!

Pokémon Ranger’s circling mechanic has these key components:

• A player health bar and breakable lasso which creates a sense of urgency and tension

• An enemy Pokémon health bar which establishes the player’s goal

• A push-your luck mechanic, where players can risk doing extra circles for Bonus XP

• Pitch-shifting on each consecutive circle, amplifying the intensity over time

The core of Pokemon Ranger was a fantastic start, but I needed to adapt it to fit the Peridot game and the feature’s design goals.

• Remove the player health bar, and replace it with a timer. This made it feel less combative but still kept the same tension.

• Incorporate the player Peridot’s level, i.e. the higher level the player Peridot is, the better it can heal the feral Peridot.

• Incorporate the player Peridot’s traits, i.e the more the player Peridot has in common with the Feral Dot, the better it can heal it!

After figuring out the state machine for the circle drawing minigame, I’ll create some rough documentation to guide the prototyping phase:

• A design document restating the design goals and detailing the game logic.

• A Figma wireframe to guide the visuals and give a high-level overview

• A balancing spreadsheet to track different sets of tuning values across our playtests.

After creating some initial documentation, I led a small kickoff meeting with our prototyping pod (a client engineer, a tech artist, and myself). For an about a week, we worked on the initial prototype together. I mainly handled game state logic, some creature behavior tree logic, UI programming, and initial tuning.

After our first build was released, we had an initial playtest with the entire Peridot team. It was a mix of in-person and remote team members (we had them record their play sessions), and was totally blind for most of the team. As expected, it was incredibly humbling but also showed promise. Some early pieces of feedback we were able to act quickly on were:

• People were confused about lifting up their finger to stop the lasso, so we added in a prompt to do so.

• People were confused about the lasso intersecting with other meshes, so we moved the lasso to screen space.

• People couldn’t tell when the lasso breaks. We added a sound, haptics, and color change to indicate this.

Full gameplay video here.

We went through around 8 cycles of this playtesting, feedback, and iterating before we we decided it was ready to ship. In the last half, we were able to ramp on more team members like animation, VFX, and sound, and expand our playtest audience beyond our dev team. I was able to focus primarily on tuning the different difficulty levels.