COMBAT DESIGN
Unity ARPG (Unity): Combat Design Example
Role: Lead Designer
Team Size: 3
Objective:
Create an Action RPG where the player pilots a customizable starship and determines its combat performance through equipment and crew development.
Design Challenge:
Traditional space shooters offer limited ship customization, often focusing only on weapon loadouts and movement speed. I wanted to create a deep combat system that affected customization through meaningful trade-offs, with thousands of possible configurations to encourage experimentation, replayability, and player-driven strategy.
Design Solution:
I led a small team to design a modular ship system where every gameplay-relevant stat was influenced by equipment and crew skill investment. Working closely with the lead programmer, I specified design parameters linking ship modules and crew attributes to key performance metrics such as:
Maximum speed, acceleration, and deceleration
Rotation speed / maneuverability
Shield resilience and regeneration
Armor durability, weapon resistance, weight, and repair rate
Weapon range, speed, damage, and accuracy
Solar Echoes TTRPG: Combat Design Goals Example
Role: Lead Designer
Team Size: 3
Objective: Redesign traditional tabletop combat to be team-focused, faster-paced, and involve no turn-taking.
Design Challenge:
After years of playing other TTRPGs, I found the slow, turn-based combat and long wait times between player turns significantly reduced player engagement and teamwork. Players often acted independently, and combat felt disconnected and sluggish. My goal was to create a system that was cinematic, cooperative, and efficient, keeping all players engaged in every moment of the game.
Design Solution:
To achieve this, I led my team to rethink combat from the ground up. Despite initial skepticism, I encouraged them to challenge traditional assumptions about turn order and initiative systems.
The result was a simultaneous-resolution combat model, where players act together rather than waiting for individual turns.
Solar Echoes TTRPG: Starship Combat Design
This example illustrates the starship combat system I designed for the Solar Echoes TTRPG. When developing the system with my team, I wanted to move away from the slow, square-counting method common in tabletop games. While that worked well for close-quarters tactical combat, it felt too mechanical and sluggish for cinematic starship battles.
To streamline gameplay and keep the pace exciting, I abstracted distances into three simple ranges: close, medium, and long. When more than two ships participated, battle zones were drawn as circles to indicate who was engaged and at what distance. This allowed players to assess positioning at a glance and make quick, tactical decisions without slowing the action.
Weapon targeting and damage systems were also tied to range. At close range, attackers could target specific ship systems such as engines, weapons, shields, or life support. At medium or long range, defenders chose which system was hit, representing evasive maneuvers that made pinpoint attacks harder.
To keep all players involved, each player would choose a specific role: Commander, Pilot, Science Officer, Com Officer, Tactical Officer, or Engineer. Every role provided unique actions and bonuses that influenced the starship's stats and skill checks each round. For example, the Commander could grant a crucial bonus to one officer each round, reinforcing teamwork and strategic coordination.
This design emerged from early beta testing, where I noticed one of the players disengaged during ship battles (he even left the table to nap on the couch). By making every player responsible for a vital function, the starship itself became a shared character that required the participation of all players as a team. The system successfully engaged all players, even the previously disinterested tester——he decided the Commander role was his favorite.
Unity ARPG Enemy AI Behavior Design
This chart shows only a portion of the full AI roster I've been developing for enemy behaviors. Each entry outlines the AI's core behavior pattern, the specific challenge it presents to players, the design intent behind it, and the most effective weapons to counter it.
These behaviors were developed to create a wide range of tactical challenges in a dynamic battlefield, encouraging players to experiment with different gear loadouts, skill investments, and strategic use of special abilities. Each AI type balances player power growth with new challenges, especially when multiple types are combined in a single encounter.
Solar Echoes TTRPG: Talent Progression and the Balance of Power
To balance power scaling in the Solar Echoes tabletop RPG and maintain meaningful player progression across 20 character levels, I designed a talent gating system based on skill investment rather than traditional class levels. Because a skill’s rank cannot exceed a character’s level, this approach naturally delays access to more powerful talents without relying on arbitrary level locks. High-tier talents may also require prerequisite abilities, encouraging intentional build paths and long-term planning. In this classless system, players have complete freedom to shape their characters.
This design choice significantly enhanced both build diversity and replayability. During games conducted at conventions, players frequently chose talents first to envision their character concept, then selected a race and planned their skill investment to optimize that build. Players often coordinated as a group during character creation to form balanced, synergistic teams. This collaborative process naturally reinforced the team-based mindset essential to Solar Echoes, where survival and success hinge on cooperation, coordination, and tactical synergy, discouraging solo playstyles and encouraging players to rely on each other throughout every aspect of the game.
Solar Echoes TTRPG: Empowering Unarmed Fighters in a Weapon-Dominated Game
As a Combat Designer for the Solar Echoes tabletop RPG, I identified that melee-focused characters, particularly unarmed martial-artist builds, were underperforming in damage output compared to melee combatants with weapons and ranged combatants with firearms.
To address this, I introduced the "chainable" mechanic that allows players to link two unarmed melee talents (including repeating the same move) in a single round, significantly boosting their damage potential and tactical flexibility. This solution not only balanced close-range combat but also deepened build variety and made a martial-artist build an exciting and viable choice.
The Star Legation: Combat Tactics in a Story Framework
In the cinematic visual novel, The Star Legation, I designed a series of choice-driven combat encounters that translate tactical decision-making into an interactive narrative format. Early in the game, players select their preferred combat style: ranged (laser pistol) or melee (spiked gloves and boots). These choices influence the options available during battle sequences. Throughout these encounters, players must make quick strategic decisions such as “Stay Behind Cover,” “Dive for Cover,” “Rush the Soldier,” or “Fire at Left Target.” Each choice triggers short cinematic outcomes and advances the flow of combat, with success or failure determined by the sequence of decisions made before the player sustains critical damage.
Later in the story, these mechanics expand into starship battles, introducing conditional advantages like flanking maneuvers (“Tactical Advantage”) and targeted strikes on enemy engines or shield generators.
During these encounters, players must make optimal tactical choices to avoid longer, inefficient branching paths--enemies inflict damage each round upon allies or the player's starship, so taking too long to dispatch a foe can lead to destruction and mission failure. Together, these systems create a turn-based, narrative combat structure that balances player skill, timing, and cinematic tension.
Unity ARPG: The Hoarder's Dilemma - Sometimes, You Just Have to Scrap It!
The combat system is designed to reward adaptability and decision-making under pressure. Enemy armor resistances encourage players to diversify their loadouts, switch between equipped weapons in combat, and keep a variety of weapon types in reserve.
The engineer crew member adds another strategic layer, automatically repairing the player’s armor using metal scrap collected from destroyed enemy starships. However, the rate of repair depends on both the engineer’s skill level and the complexity of the armor type. When resources run low, players face the tough decision of possibly having to sacrifice valuable equipment in the scrapper to convert it into metal scrap.
These interconnected systems ensure that every battle feels tense and reactive. Players must constantly evaluate weapon choices, resource availability, and survivability, making combat a dynamic and engaging balance between offense, defense, and economy.
Unity ARPG: Adaptive Weapon Strategy
This clip demonstrates the adaptive combat loop, where armor resistances encourage players to keep multiple weapon types in reserve. With six weapon categories and five armor resistances, players are rewarded for reading battlefield conditions and selecting the most effective tools for each encounter.
Unity ARPG: Repair & Resource Tension
Combat balances offensive power with resource management. The engineer’s repair rate depends on armor complexity and available metal scrap, creating a dynamic tension between preserving gear, conserving resources, and surviving challenging combat encounters. Players must decide when to risk scrapping equipment to produce the metal needed for emergency repairs, balancing the loss of valuable gear against the need to survive deadly encounters.