Faefarm

Faefarm

Faefarm is a magical farming sim with a ton of charm featuring expansive crafting, foraging and farming systems, a heartwarming story filled with quests and relationships with a cast of delightful NPC townsfolks, critters and creatures to befriend and of course many resource rich dungeons to explore with combat and puzzle challenges!

Responsibilities

Progression and systems

The main focus of my work on Faefarm was to focus on creating rewarding experiences for players while staying true to the direction of the project. A key focus area for me as a Systems Designer was to consolidate vast amounts of information about our mechanics and Core Loop into digestible documentation for the team - which would help us make informed decisions for building out a clean FTUE (first time user experience) that provided all the information the player needed without becoming overhwelming.

I worked closely with our Creative Director (Katie De Sousa) Game Director (Ian Holowka) and our team of incredible experts to update designs to our progression systems and identify interlocking systems to build out a holistic and comprehensive farming simulation experience.

The images below are some (but not all) of the systems visualization design I built that allowed us to organize sections of our work by utilizing Miro boards. I creating a key using emoji symbols and colours to communicate the various aspects of our items at a glance.

Caveat: some of the tuning numbers are not the final tuned numbers as once these systems were implemented I moved all our specific tuning and balancing systems into google sheets for a more efficient tuning process

The foundational documentation work we did to set ourselves up for success so much so that I was able to manage implementing, tuning and balancing of over 2000 individual items, that distilled into over 580+ recipes - all interconnected to our farming, crafting, cooking, potion making, critter taming, animal care, mining, combat and flower + fruit tree breeding systems.

Much of my progression work also included the games currency (“Florin”) economy - which connected to all of the resource systems listed above as the player can sell any of the resources they yield by populating the limited market tables to gain Florins. Florins are the main driving resource to allow the player to access various progression points such as tool upgrade progression, homestead upgrade progression and purchasing special cosmetic items.

Quest Systems

Alongside my systems and progression work I worked cloesly our Narrative Designer (Ariadne Macgillivray) and Technical Designer (Barrett Rodych) to implement the quest steps and tune rewards for Faefarms main story quests, as well as non-story quests such as the relationship quest and job quests features.

The progression of many of the available homesteads and resources needed to be tied to the games main story progression - we built out more visualizations in Miro to help guide our decisions of what resources ought to be available at what story milestones.