Shadowveil Legend of the Five Rings
About
Shadowveil: Legend of the five Rings is a Rogulite Auto-battler Palindrome started developing in early 2023.
It serves as a first step for players who are not strategy gamers to get started with the genre, as well as introducing the vast world of Legend of the Five rings to a new audience.
In Shadowveil you embark with a limited number of units into the Shadowlands to deal with a growing threat beyond the Carpenter Wall. To do this the player must equip and gear up their party with abilities and items as well as master the art of deployment to get deep enough into the Shadowlands to strike at it's core.
You can find Shadowveil on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2536960/Shadowveil_Legend_of_The_Five_Rings/
Main Role: Game Design
Team Size: 19 developers
Time: 2+ years
Engine: Unreal Engine
Platform: PC
Genre: Roguelite, Auto-battler, Strategy
While I played a large part in designing core features and content for abilities, enemies and bosses, diplomatic advancements, masteries, traits, meta-layer-currency and as well as balance all of it. The two former mentions were however the most different and interesting to work on for Shadowveil. This stems from the limitations with combat in an auto-battler.
Abilities
One of the more important parts, if not the most core part of building a units strength is through adding Abilities.
Abilities has also been one of my biggest area of responsibility. Designing abilities that spark curiosity and inspire the player to combine them into something cool.
Designing abilities in itself is not something that is new to me. It's a kind of design I've been very interested in for a long time, and has also been allowed to do a lot of at Palindrome in general, and Shadowveil in particular.
What's different about Shadowveil is that it is an auto-battler. What this means in practice is that the player has no actual control over when and where an ability is cast in real time so I have to design with that limitation in mind.
Fortunately limitations are not necessarily a bad thing. They can also jog creativity. We simply have to move any sort of targeting to the point in the game where the player do have some control. Before combat even start.
Most abilities are straight forward enough that they simply execute on whomever is their current target.
The very last thing the player does before combat is deploying their units on to the battlefield. That means they can to some degree control where enemy units are in relation to a player unit, so we can utilize that for targeting.
Deploying a unit to target the units farthest away at the start of combat is one thing. But what about targeting the farthest away unit every time it is cast? This still present some player, control although it is much less reliable since unit will eventually move around. Now players need to think one step further in their attempt to stay on target. Or they need to make sure the target stays in place through other means.
This goes well with abilities targeting allies as well. Even more so since the player has the agency to decide the location for all units it affects
Although they now have to consider if they rather deploy a otherwise fragile back line unit closer to their front line, just to target a specific unit with a beneficial effect.
Even though this way of targeting works rather well for some abilities there are those that need to do smart targeting automatically to not become absolutely awful to play with. Healing proved to be one of those types of abilities who needs to do this. In this case the game will simply pick whichever unit has the least amount of health % remaining.
The other important part about designing abilities for Shadowveil was to create a space for the player to be creative and build cool combinations the way you often do in card games.
Abilities had to be able to stand on their own, but they should also be able to amplify each other.
I want the player to be excited about finding something so broken that it almost feels unintended.
I believe a great example of this is how Cleansing Flames, Ravenous Swarm and Fiery Wrath ties into each other.
They are all pretty good by themselves, but when played together the Witch Hunter turns into a fire spreading engine that could annihilate hoards of enemies in a fiery inferno.
Enemies
All games need an enemy of sorts. A challenge, something to overcome. In Shadowveil some enemies has exploitable flaws, some are cannon fodder and some bring something to the table players want to remove sooner rather than later.
Mix them all together and the player should have a challenging time coming out victorious unscathed.
Much like abilities enemies had to be designed with the fact that the game is an auto-battler in mind. This means the player can't be punished harshly because their unit stand in fire, because they can't actively tell units not to stand in fire. We can however punish them for not killing the unit who creates fire.
The Goblin Firemouth has a strong healing ability, while the Lost Sentry has a debuff that prevent the player from healing their units instead. Players can chose to ignore these, and suffer the consequences, or try to target them with abilities or such. Because these enemies are ranged, they will often be the subject of abilities that target enemies farthest away. But the player could also be more blunt and use Masteries that allows them to target a certain enemy.
The Hobgoblin has an Axe Throwing ability that targets the player unit farthest away, while the Madōshi Corruptor puts a lengthy stun on the payer unit closest to it at the start of combat. This means which unit the player deploy and where will have an impact. They want to avoid deploying their glass canon unit far away from the Hobgoblin, but they also want to avoid deploying someone too vital, like a main tank, closest to the Madōshi Corruptor.
Shadowveil had a few more enemies designed that we unfortunately never had the opportunity to implemented but I believe could've presented an interesting challenge that players could play around in an auto-battler.
The Flyer
(short) Ranged unit.
This unit can only be damaged by ranged attacks.
When The Flyer gets to 10% HP it is stunned for X seconds.
While The Flyer is stunned it is also grounded, exposing it to melee attacks.
This enemy would've encouraged the player to add ranged attacks to their repertoar, but it could also be reasonably countered by bringing tools that stun enemies. In Shadowveil about half of the classes has ranged attacks for base attacks. And the other half can still obtain the few ranged ones, or stuns. The idea here is to encourage the player to be more conscious about how they build their team and where they deploy their ranged units so that they target The Flyer first, rather than whichever enemy happens to filter through to the front line.
The intention of combat in Shadowveil was for it to be the result of decisions the player made leading up to them.
I believe most our enemies followed this theory to a certain extent, some better than others.
Both the Hobgoblin and one of the Spirit enemies wanted to chase the target with the least amount of health which allowed the player to set up traps and obstacles that made that difficult for them. This could easily be countered through several means.
On the contrary the Madōshi faction has a passive effect where they heal to full whenever another Madōshi dies.
The idea was that the player would prefer focusing one at a time, rather than trying to AOE them all simultaneously.
Unfortunately due to the nature if auto-battlers units often started attacking a wide selection of different units once the first one fell, which made the idea fall on it's face pretty often.
Bosses
Boss design for Shadowveil is very similar to that of normal enemies, but at a grander scale and significance.
Their damage hurt more, their health is greater and their defense denser.
But there still needs to be something for the player to consider when they deploy into them to make bosses interesting.
Shadowveil features three bosses in total. Gragokku is a big goblin with an even bigger mouth, taunting the player and throwing axes with similar logic as the one of the Hobgoblin. Magansha, the final boss of each chapter the player has to figure out how to prevent from reanimating and putting a stop his devastating destruction.
In between these two there is a trio of keepers called The Lost Library Guardians.
The Lost Library Guardian encounter is split into three phases. The player fight one guardian at a time of their choice and has the opportunity to change their deployment between each guardian.
Each guardian aids with a different mechanic depending on if they are currently being fought, is patiently waiting, or has already been defeated.
Vitality Guardian
Active:
Whenever a unit dies, this Guardian heals for 20% of max health.
Waiting:
Prevents player from casting Heal and Shield abilities.
Dead:
Guardians gain 1000 Health and become immune to Wounded.
Strategy Guardian
Active:
Takes reduced damage to non-critical hits.
Waiting:
Summon a Corrupt Spirit.
Dead:
Guardians gain 1000 Health and become immune to Weakened.
Wisdom Guardian
Active:
Attacks the lowest max health player unit.
Waiting:
Deals a large amount of damage to units who are adjacent to each other.
Dead:
Guardians gain 1000 Health and become immune to Burning.
The idea here is that the player controls their destiny throughout the encounter.
Depending on what you built you want to attack them in a different order. If you have no healing abilities Vitality Guardian waiting effect is not an issue, but if you the party if heavily reliant on Burning damage you might have to kill it before the Wisdom Guardian either way.