Cin of Cigma Full Gameplay Video
About
Cin of Cigma is a 2D fantasy action role-playing game created in an in-house game engine written in C++, the entire project spans across 8 months. In Cin of Cigma, take the unconventional role of the support character, Cin to protect your ally, Dust to fight off enemies of the Darkness.
Main Roles
Producer, Technical Game Designer, Music/Sound Designer
Design Insights
1. It is crucial to know what is to be achieved/solved with your design.
Before designing the boss fight in Cin of Cigma, I planned a list of what should be achieved/solved to design more meaningfully:
a. Reduce number of new assets required to create this boss fight. Reason: Time and people constraint. Solution: Reduce boss attack animations by designing the boss character to fight by summoning other enemy types instead.
b. Showcase all created game elements thus far (eg. enemies, terrain obstacles). Reason: We want the players to reminisce and use everything they've learnt to in this final fight. Solution: Boss attacks both by summoning enemies and terrain obstacles.
c. The boss fight should be completed within 2 tries by the average player. Reason: The final fight should not be overly frustrating as it would be one of the most memorable moments for the player. This is also the only boss fight in the game so the player should not be learning new fighting strategies at this point. Solution: Boss attacks in waves of enemies or terrain obstacles depending on the total number of enemies on screen at that time. Thus reducing the likelihood of the player being swarmed by too many enemies and unable to recover.
2. Abilities should support how the player interacts with the game as their player character. In Cin of Cigma, when the player plays as the support character Cin, the player should genuinely feel that they are fulfilling the supportive function. However, looking at Cin's skills to debuff enemies and summon the ally Dust to his immediate location, it becomes apparent that a different dynamic was created. Resulting in Cin actually coming across more as a commander than a support character, as the player controls Dust like a short-range turret or shield.
3. Simplify things, question if something is really necessary. Simplification can help to improve the player's understanding, resulting in better informed decisions and a more engaging game experience. Here are some examples:
a. Enemies Initially, having a wide variety of enemies might seem exciting, but it reduces the player's ability to identify and learn enemy behavior well. Instead, another method to increase game difficulty is to group different enemies together or to combine an enemy with a terrain obstacle.
b. Game Terms Using consistent terms for item requirements improves the player's ability to compare and make informed decisions especially in a game with many items. Such as if [ earth skill = 1 moon, fire skill = 1 rock, 1 moon = 2 rock ] compared to [ earth skill = 2 rock, fire skill = 1 rock ].
4. Importance of Proof of Concept and Play Testing. As Cin of Cigma's concept of playing as the support character is uncommon amongst indie games, there is not much information on what mechanics/gimmicks are proven to work for our target audience. Thus, the proof of concept serves to gauge the players' interest in the game.
Other Takeaways
1. Learning to Adapt to Online Collaboration As this project took place during Covid-19 Circuit Breaker, all of our brainstorming, meetings, code reviews, etc. were done online. We quickly realized the limitations of online discussions - unable to rapid prototype together, screen sharing latency, visualizing the same concept differently, etc. We managed to adapt and solve these issues by using applications like Miro, Trello, Microsoft Teams, GitHub and more.
2. Importance of User-Centered Design in Any User Interface In the later stages of the project, I realized that many engine editor features I created were not as useful to the designers as I initially thought. This made me realize that similar to how designers conduct playtests to ensure that their game delivers the intended player experience, I should observe how the designers work with the editor to meet their needs.