Smoke & Steel

Studio: Bearded Reptile Productions
Role: Game Designer
Genre: Survivor-Style Top-Down Shooter
JUN 2024 - Present

Smoke & Steel is a small-scale project being developed by myself and a few remaining members of the Mirage Knights dev team, reformed as Bearded Reptile Productions. Smoke & Steel is a small-scale survivor-style game where the player pilots various tanks against swarms of dragons (bug enemies are placeholder), inspired in part by the movie Reign of Fire. Tanks can be outfitted with various weapons, artillery, gadgets, and crewmembers, more of all of which are unlocked over the course of multiple runs. Our dev team consists of four people: a designer (me), an artist, an engineer, and a hybrid designer/engineer/producer who keeps us all in line. The goal is to keep the team size limited to roughly this size throughout development, hopefully adding no more than one or two more members if needed and contracting for anything extra needed beyond that. This way we hope to keep our funding needs much smaller or even non-existent, allowing us to launch without publishing support if need be, and build from early-access.

My responsibilities as designer include 99% of our design and blueprint scripting for systems and mechanics (including all our inventory systems, all our weapons and crew, all our progression, and so on), as well our concise little GDD. Our artist Liam is once again (as with mirage knights) providing both all the art and acting as our level designer, with us collaborating on certain high-level aspects of level flow. Our triple-threat hybrid is focused on mid-match objectives and quests, as well as maintaining our Jira, Confluence, Miro boards, etc, and our engineer is solving all the hard problems the rest of us are too dumb to figure out (and is taking point on enemy and wave design).

Design-wise, the game is meant to be extremely simple, but with hopefully a high skill ceiling both for build-depth and input skill. Tanks have either one or two inputs (movement-only, or in some cases an aimable turret), and fire their weapons automatically on internal cooldowns in the style of Survivor type games. We’re taking this formula in our own direction by leaning into a more dynamic interaction between the player’s weapon loadout, the tank’s “crew” (characters that can be assigned to weapons and provide passive buffs either to that weapon specifically or to the tank globally), and “outfits,” which provide broader buffs and abilities for the tank itself, such as improvements to handling and speed, additional passive effects like defensive shields and countermeasures, and even special maneuvers.