Charles Gormley, Game and Level Designer
Coven's concept came from a love for both the tactics genre and a deep appreciation and frustration with a game called 'Darkest Dungeon'. The concept of having to worry about not only your units actual health but also their mental health I thought was an interesting concept though I often felt Darkest Dungeons difficulty often was far too brutal.
Granted I enjoy brutally difficulty games and I fully intended for Coven to be difficult I knew I just wanted it to be much more driven by player mistakes rather than Darkest Dungeons Roll of the die. Of course I didn't intend to remove Randomness from Coven as the dirty secret of strategy and tactics games is that the RNG is often what drives interesting decisions and scenarios. Often time the best tactics games make is so letting yourself be cornered by RNG is the mistake of the player not the game.
That push and pull of things being out of your control and yet having to manage it is what Coven was initially built on. Random Traits, Scars, the risk of a unit losing their mind and attacking both you and the enemy. All of these were to create a sense of simultaneously a feeling of barely controlling these monsters under your command and having the player focus on risk management rather than just trying to make the most effective combat decision.
Creative Lead Role
Art Showcase
Leading a large group of people was a daunting new task for me on this project. I had done pitch docs before and expressed my ideas plenty of times people but getting art and animation teams to understand and bring those ideas to life was an exciting and interesting challenge.
Art was the first major hurdle as it was the first step to literally bringing the idea in my head into reality. I was lucky enough to have a great lead artist and director that were able to take my words, references and find that cohesive look and lead the artists to create within that look that we settled on.
Animation Showcase
Animation while similar to art brought in new questions and challenges I had to answer and solve. Many of which were questions I had never been asked or even thought about. "How do the characters in your world move" is a strange question to parse at first. It's something you normally don't think of as it seems so natural but when you look at different games, movies, shows even other people they all move in their own way.
So my first step in leading Animation was to think of how one character moved and it naturally grew from there. Our shield bearing character was the first character I shot reference footage for. From there we ended up having to do footage for said character twice as the first time ended up running into issues I hadn't anticipated both in the filming location and again taking for granted what we implicitly understand as humans.
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Eventually we filmed again along with some other captures for a few of the other characters like our shambling zombie the Caretaker. With these two characters solidified the rest ended up coming naturally and our skilled animation team was able make an incredible amount of animations for the game.
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The biggest lessons I learned from this experience was not only what I needed to think more critically about when designing a game but also how to give direction to teams without micromanaging them. I often used to fear that when I got into a lead role I would end up being overbearing to my colleagues as I tried to make my vision a reality however, things ended up coming out in their best state when I gave solid direction to the teams and let them set off on their own to make it happen. They're the artists and animators not myself, thus they should be the ones doing it.
Lead Programming Role
Being the lead programmer wasn't a job I intended to have when I first started this project but when the choice became "Take the lead programmer role or the project won't happen" I found myself taking the position to make the project happen.
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Admittedly there was a lot of things I had to learn on this project about being a lead programmer. While I felt my own code was solid what I learned in this project what it meant to actually be a lead programmer was to bring your coders together under the same umbrella of structure and content. Early on I let things get out of hand due to my own lack of confidence in my scripting ability but as we reached the end of production I started losing the thread on other people's code and it became a struggle to correct. Not to say their code was bad in fact it works great it's just with a lack of proper commenting, discussion and setting time aside to do code reviews going into others code became a near impossibility if I wanted to work on something in their field.
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If there was something to take away from this experience it's not only how to better lead in this position but also the nuances of every person's scripting practices. It's quite a bit different from the Creative Lead role as doing full reviews and making sure we were all understanding each others code and letting people go with just an assignment or direction and that being it just wasn't enough to keep the code in order.
Download C.O.V.E.N
