Eetu Leppälä
A Game Design Portfolio
Discordant
Discordant is a surreal rhythm-action game where you defeat enemies to the beat of the music. Explore the mysterious astral plane and restore the Sun to the dark North.
↑ Discordant in action.
Contributions
In 2022 I was a part of a 6-member team creating Discordant, a rythm-based bullet hell game. The game was developed over the course of three months as a part of a game project course in Aalto University. Among other things I:
- Developed a story and thematized core mechanics
- Designed enemy types, encounters and level design
- Did playtesting and task design
- Was in charge of art direction and game production
Design Highlights
↑ Health = progress = difficulty. Early on we had problems with how to control difficulty in situations where the player is still learning or they just lose their grip on the controller etc. which was pretty common since the game was so fast-paced. I came up with a system of tying player health and progression to the difficulty of each battle. This meant that each player would have to surmount the hardest part of the level in order to progress, acting as a skill-lock, but also acted as a buffer for all the edge-cases mentioned above, because every time you would get hit and lose health, the game would become a bit easier, allowing for regaining control. This feature got a lot of positive feedback in the playtesting sessions both from experienced players as well as novices.
↑ Different enemy types. Early on we noticed the need for different kinds of challenges when it came to combining agile movement and managing enemy attacks to the beat. This image I painted was used as a master concept art to derive the rest of the style for the game. We had a lot of talks on the complexity of the music and the needs for the music from gameplay perspective, for example having adaptive music so that we can change the complexity of the track on the fly, and add more of different kinds of enemies.