Ransacked is a PC game developed by a team of 12 over a 16 week period in Unreal Engine 4. It can be downloaded here for free on Itch.io. An Xbox controller is recommended for play.

What I Did:

• Balanced gameplay values (weight, worth, volume) of 200+ loot items
• Designed and implemented a spawning system for curated-random loot placement
• Designed, greyboxed, and wrote documentation for 5 unique challenge ‘Heists’
• Arranged the environmental sets for the changing Thieves Guild hub states
• Wrote and maintained live documentation artists and designers used to create loot, UI, SFX, and level design assets

Accolades:
– Featured on PC Gamer’s Free Games of the week
– Featured on RockPaperShotgun’s Free Games of the Week
– Peaked at #9 Most Popular Games on Itch.io’s home page
– Over 3,000 downloads
– Lets Plays, featured in the comments of Ransacked’s Itch page

Design Process in Detail:

I was tasked with balancing gameplay variables for a “desired run”: a 4 – 6 minute experience with an average payout of 200 – 350 gold. These would help scale how many runs players needed to make to progress to the challenge missions. I placed loot in a way that kept houses below a set maximum in worth and spread valuables across houses that were next to each other so that players could have successful runs without needing to skulk all over town. This system worked incredibly well with our loot population system, and a dominant majority of our playtesters made desired runs each playthrough.

The loot population system was a curated-random method for making each run feel unique while adhering to house themes, desired run goals, and level optimization. Working closely with the lead programmer, we created a system of Blueprint-spawned houses that allowed us to swap out loot content within and stream-in spawner nodes only when needed. I created 60+ different spawners with unique arrays of loot that fit within a theme or rarity, so that houses wouldn’t always have the same valuables in the same location. Players would be trained to quickly check hotspots and then move on to other houses instead of farming specific ones.

Risk v. Reward Gameplay Direction
As lead designer, I was in charge of establishing and maintaining our design pillars in gameplay. The main theme we wanted in every moment of play was a constant assessment of risk and reward. Bag management was on a “last-in, first-out” basis; tossing an item that was taken earlier in the run required dumping out all loot taken after it. These were the core challenges faced by players, as well as needing to successfully make it back to the town center with their loot to complete the run.

I worked very closely with the art team throughout development to establish a set of aesthetic principles for loot recognition, like overall brightness or saturation. When the player steals an item, the UI displays name and weight, but not gold value. I wanted players to wager items while in the field, much like a burglar would have to do “on-the-job”. I categorized loot into 4 degrees of rarity with assigned colors that our tech artist made into a shader that highlight the loot with it’s rarity color when hovered over.

Heist Missions
While our initial plan was for an arcade-like repeatable experience, we were requested to have a defined critical path and elements of progression to show for a presentation. I was tasked with designing narrative-driven challenge missions that would work in tandem with our core gameplay of burglarizing houses.

I designed a series of increasingly difficult story missions based around stealing the most renown treasure of the town. These ‘Heists’ would be initiated by purchasing riddles from the Informant that would lead players to a particular themed house. Heist gameplay featured more vigilant guards, rarer loot, and unique puzzle mechanics relating to the purchased riddle that needed to be solved to acquire the loot. As they acquired the ‘Legendary Loot’ items from each Heist, the Thieve’s Guild hub changed to reflect the newfound wealth and status.
I designed the riddles, challenge mechanics, level design of the Heist houses, and the changing Guild states. The design document for the first Heist can be viewed below, and includes the level design methodology I used when designing the missions.