1. What's the goal? This is usually answered by an issue present in the game loop such as a match going on too long, too high of a difficulty, or something feeling too repeatable.

2. What makes it cool? If it's not novel in some way or adding production value then it's probably not be worth adding.

3. What makes it intuitive? Things must always make sense to the player. 

4. What does it make the player feel? I believe the essence of engaging gameplay is evoking emotion. Whether the feeling is positive or negative, that is what I want every one of my designs to do. 

5. What's the feasibility? Involving everyone that will need to contribute to executing a design is necessary. Otherwise, the final implementation may be a shell of the concept and fail to meet the above criteria. 

6. What's the beginner's mind? In my experience, the best designs are rarely straight design doc to code. A proof of concept allows dialogue with QA and players to improve and truly shine.

I designed and implemented the following enemies:

• Shambler - The cannon fodder of the roster and most common enemy type during the early game. This enemy was designed to provoke anxiety with its classic zombie like movement appearing from the fog and put pressure on the player to loot and leave the area quickly to save on ammo. It rewards headshots by not dying in one hit unless hit in the head and punishing the player for missing the head by often falling to the ground and crawling forward, disrupting player aim level. 

• Feral - The fast enemy that appears more as the game progresses to increase difficulty. This enemy is capable of moving the same speed as a sprinting player and can sometimes perform a pounce to damage them even during a full sprint. Introducing a limited stamina bar to the player made this enemy type feel like a real threat despite it dying to one shot anywhere because most weapons do not have more than 6 bullets and cannot be reloaded while sprinting.

• Shooter - The ambusher. This enemy appears relatively often and fires a ranged repeater at players from cover if it's available. It presents a more difficult aiming challenge than the melee enemies and forces the player into cover. Increased player weapon sway while moving makes these difficult if not dealt with quickly. 

• Suicide Bomber - The immediate threat. This enemy appears rarely and broadcasts its presence with loud visual and audio cues because of the high damage it can inflict. It was introduced to punish players for sticking too closely together. It was tuned to move relatively fast so it pulls the player from what they were doing to deal with it as a priority target.

• Grenadier - The area denier. This enemy appears a bit more often than the suicide bomber. It hurls Molotov cocktails that create a fire damage area. It was introduced to force players out of interiors and create areas of denial that will challenge trained map knowledge. 

• Witch - The stealth enforcer. This enemy is extremely rare. It has relatively high health, making it difficult to kill alone. It is completely invisible but has a loud positional audio cue to incentivize the player to use stealth to avoid alerting it. If alerted, it moves much faster than the player can sprint and must be damaged to be staggered repeatedly or it will almost certainly kill the player.

• Pot Head - The teamwork enforcer. This enemy appears somewhat often and is identical to a Shambler except that it is armored and cannot take damage unless flanked. It incentivizes players to work together by flanking when it targets another player and sometimes gives a great feeling of accomplishment if able to land a shot through its front armor. 

• Loot Goblin - The game changer. This enemy appears extremely rarely and has a safe on its back that is immune to damage. It is the only enemy that runs away from the player instead of attacking, promoting chasing it down with teamwork to cut it off, kill it, and receive a large reward of loot.

• Demon - The ultimate threat. Only one of these appears per match and this enemy cannot be damaged by any looted weapons and has no direct attacks. It requires placing coils to weaken and then banish with a scripted event. It was made to personify the AI director system because defeating it wins the game and make the process of becoming a monster more intuitive.

Getting the game loop to a point where it felt intuitive was a challenge because the mechanics of each of these games are not complimentary on face value. For example, every player starting as a human and then unlocking the ability to turn into the monster was one of the most difficult things to make feel intuitive because the player is effectively switching sides mid-match. In this case, adding a character that represents the concept of evil, the demon, helped solve this issue by simplifying the concept for players that they are earning favor with the demon by taking actions against their fellow humans, with the ultimate reward of becoming the monster.

The genre mash up presented a challenge with which emotions to reinforce for the player. The obvious emotion for the overarching horror theme would be fear. However, this was at odds with both Co-op and PvP elements. The co-op experience would diminish fear by virtue of having a friend there for you. The PvP elements would diminish fear by compelling the player to increase their screen brightness and override the emotion with competitiveness. By designing to instead evoke anxiety, the game became a much more consistently emotional experience for players. For example, shifting from directing the player through a nearly completely dark forest into a jump scare to instead brightening the forest, adding view distance restricting fog, and emphasizing unsettling environmental sound design to cue a player monster nearby. 

The initial design was not feasible for me alone to execute due to the amount of gameplay actors that would need to be present such as AI traders, multiple enemy types, in-match player monster abilities, and hunter abilities. Instead, the game was broken up into design stages, emulating the game it was inspired by, to refine those specific gameplay elements. This strategy allowed me to gradually implement the initial design over the course of 3 years.

Each build was tuned with design changes from tester feedback and iteration on the inspiring game's mode took roughly 1 year each mainly due to me being sole gameplay programmer.