No Water in Hell

Standalone long-term Unity Published Project

Not even Hell Will keep You Down

Players fight through multiplayer floors of hell, inspired by Dante’s Inferno with cartoon/arcade spins on existing ideas. A wide range of items, weapons, music, levels, and enemies await players bold enough to take on this roguelike experience, coming soon to Steam.

No Water in Hell (2019-2023)

Collaboritive?: Team Project // Tools: Unity, Adobe Suite, FL Studio // Timeline: 4 Years

Role(s): Lead Level Designer, Composer

2D indie dungeon-crawler roguelike game set in the depths of Hell, in which you play as a firefighter determined to get out by spraying down demons and slaying bosses.

Contributions

Procedural level designs: mapped, balanced, implemented, and playtested over 60+ room layouts.
Documentation: Level maps, Game Design Documents, balancing spreadsheets, etc.
Implementation: Used a custom XML-based tool developed in-house to add new rooms quickly via code and matrices.
Balancing: Modelled, balanced, and iterated on enemy designs, gameplay ingredients, and event triggers based on developer and player feedback.
Soundtrack: Composed, mastered, edited, and revised over 16 tracks for game audio based on playtesting and developer testing of tracks in-game.
Design Reviews: Hosted regular design reviews with level designers to ensure the character, camera, and controls (3Cs) were championed at each opportunity surrounding combat opportunities in-game.
Team Management: chaired meetings, oversaw workflow tools, modified team documentation, and directed workflow of team members to reach production milestones.

Core Design Challenges

My Approach

Here’s some of the ways we executed on these design decisions.

Bosses provide opportunities for each playstyle to excel; collectors can put their accumulated gear to the test to gain even more loot, aggressors engage in unique combat encounters, and explorers encounter areas exclusive to the monsters of Hell.

Some rooms offer opportunities to non-aggressor players which still forward the objectives of the game, such as our shops which allow players to improve nearly any of their stats by spending money collected throughout Hell.

Across a roster of nearly 40 enemy types, we had to be sure our proposed designs were presented fairly and proportionately to the player's skill level in a given area. Thus, we categorized and modeled design elements like this to showcase and balance as needed before even implementing.

Each combat room offers a randomized selection of enemies from a roster of nearly 40 enemy types, and vary wildly depending on how far into Hell the player goes. Thus, no two playthroughs are likely to be the same.

Many rooms also feature unique puzzles which offer loot on completion and interesting ways to take apart combat encounters.

A flow chart diagram we used to pitch and illustrate a new time trial game mode we introduced later into development.

Creative Problems

The development of No Water in Hell was a 4+ year long journey for my team and I. Over time, we faced many challenges such as changing team structures, deadlines, and other challenges which encouraged us to think creatively and practically before we solved them. From time to time, I took the opportunity to document the steps we took to solve these problems in documents or dev logs.

As an example, you can view to the right one dev log I wrote which explored the process of managing the game’s final period of development while changing content goals and dealing with changing team structure.