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Thrill of the Hunt
A Hearthstone Adventure design project
DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT: LINK Design Document: Link Changelog: Link NOTE: This adventure was designed during the release of 'One Night in Karazhan'. Scroll down for further discussion on the development process, where I closely match an industry-standard pipeline, covering areas of development through from Design, Art and Tech. |
Alongside making playable games, I felt it would be important to showcase a design challenge that shows I can join an existing development team and adopt the team's design philosophies to create fitting content that complements the project's narrative.
So, for an undergraduate project I chose to create a Hearthstone adventure. |
Narrative
After looking into a few potential themes, I decided to go with adapting an existing Warcraft experience where the player travels with Hemet Nesingwary on his well-known expeditions across Azeroth and beyond. See his notable quest lines from World of Warcraft come to life in Hearthstone! Those familiar with Warcraft lore will recognise the characters, bosses, and cards are from Hemet questlines and wrapped in lore appropriate to the Wing locations. This approach gave me the enjoyable challenge of molding memorable characters and locations into Hearthstone's flavour. |
Mechanics The core narrative itself revolves around the player honing their expertise as a big game hunter, just like Hemet. But what does every great hunter need? A great weapon, of course! The mechanics of this set focus on weapon interaction, giving each class their own weapon, as well as reinforcing class archetypes. |
Balance Unable to traditionally balance the cards via playtesting, I took my ideas to the Custom Hearthstone community on Reddit and invited critque for my designs. The feedback helped me to iterate on areas that I'd overlooked, and allowed me to, more importantly, see if my cards would be fun to play. |
Art In order to match a professional pipeline, I collaborated with the talented artist Edward Barons to help me push the adventure flavour through new card artwork. This process adds another layer to matching Hearthstone's ideologies, and helps build personality in each card's character. |
Tech
Furthermore, I wanted to add something extra to the project to help portray the feeling of a Hearthstone adventure. So, being proficient in Unreal Engine 4, I replicated Hearthstone's Main Menu System and added the Thrill of the Hunt to it. The key to this undertaking was to recreate everything notable about the Hearthstone Menu experience, including: button interaction, pop-up transition and animations, sound, and information architecture. Additionally, I added extra UI to highlight my designs. |