Thorium Empire — Charles Roger-Boutbien

Description

Thorium Empire is an RPG in the vein of Raid: Shadow Legends, featuring three distinct gameplay modes: open-world exploration, turn-based team combat and real-time 1v1 duels. The project had been in development without a game designer, I joined to bring structure to what existed and design what was missing.

My full three months were spent writing the GDD from scratch, reworking mechanics that had drifted without design oversight, and building the balancing systems that tie the game's three modes together.

My Contributions

GDD Writing

Wrote the entire Game Design Document from scratch, covering all three gameplay modes, systems, progression, UI flows and design intent, giving the team a single source of truth to build from.

Mechanic Retakes

Identified and reworked several mechanics that had been built without a designer, bringing coherence between systems that had grown independently.

Balancing Systems

Designed the full balancing framework for mercenaries, equipment and bots, defining stat structures, scaling curves and the formulas that tie them together across all three modes.

Danger System

Created a danger communication system that calculates and displays the threat level of an enemy group in real time, factoring in all relevant game parameters so players can make informed decisions before engaging.

Key Design Decisions

Building the danger system required first unifying the stat language across all three modes, without a shared framework, a 'threat level' calculation would have meant nothing because the underlying numbers weren't comparable.
Joining a project mid-development without a GDD means reverse-engineering intent before you can redesign: I documented what existed and why before touching anything, to avoid breaking decisions that had been made deliberately.
The three gameplay modes (exploration, turn-based, real-time) each have different pacing contracts with the player, the balancing systems had to account for this, ensuring a unit that's strong in turn-based doesn't trivialise real-time combat.

Skills

GDD WritingSystem DesignBalancingDanger SystemLoop DesignDocumentation

Context

ProfessionalAzer-TRemotePCRPG

Links

Site officiel