Fat Princess: Fat Roles DLC

Lead Designer

Responsiblities

• Lead design and implementation of Fat Roles DLC
• Designed, tuned and tweaked 3 new classes and 4-player same console co-op
• Included a "for free" portion that included private servers and clan tag support
  
• Managed community suggestions and desires via official and unofficial channels
  
• Responsible for interpreting results of focus testing

As my first project at Fun Bits (formerly Atomic Operations), I lead the design of Fat Princess: Fat Roles DLC. As an active member of the Fat Princess community, I was well aware of what the players wanted and my plan was to follow through and give them just that.

Fat Princess is a game that involves the never ending battle of Red vs Blue so I wanted the DLC to continue with yet another never ending debate...Pirates vs Ninjas. These classes provided the only hybrid melee/ranged classes in the game. I intentionally made their stats (run speed, damage, charge speed, etc) exactly the same so that the pirate vs ninja debate could continue right in the game as players tried to figure out if Fun Bits applied some sort of personal opinion or answer to the debate.

I decided to add one more hybrid support class, the Giant, a worker/warrior hybrid. While messing around in the development of Fat Princess, we played with altering the character's size and it truly made for some great laughs and battles, so I knew this had to be the third DLC class. The giant has two very unique features that encourage teamwork. First, he cannot rest and heal. The giant really needs a priest for support in battle. Second, the giant, if he can get close enough, can chomp down an enemy in a single hit (restoring a little health as well)...the only move in the entire game that does this. I would call this a successful attempt at creating a class that felt balanced even thought it does extreme damage and needs help to stay alive.