Summary
Age of Espers is a free-to-play card RPG designed for mobile devices. Aside from the classic collect, enhance, evolve cycle, Age of Espers included a real-time combat system and a room-based exploration mode.
My Contributions
I was a member of a three designer team working on Age of Espers. My key responsibilities were designing and documenting the core game systems based on management's requirements. We used a strict waterfall process with remote developers, so our documentation had to be very thorough, including detailed wireframes, screen flows, and formulas, that could be handed off with minimal confusion. I also worked with management, our in-house artists, and our remote-developers, to prototype the initial combat system. Later in the development, I worked on progression related content (combat and economic tuning).
Players battle enemies by summoning out espers to perform attacks. Matching up elemental vulnerabilities, discovering mechanical counters, and understanding the casting time, cooldown, and mana cost of each esper, helps players succeed in battle and readies them to fight increasingly harder enemies and bosses.
Players navigate a series of room-based dungeons. Each marked room contains the possibility of encounters, treasures, and story events.
As players overcome each challenge, they unlock new dungeons, islands, and regions.
From the esper menus, players can manage and equip their espers for use in dungeons, use in-game resources to upgrade their espers and evolve them into more powerful forms, and obtain new espers by paying resources to perform draws. Each draw is chance based, meaning the player can obtain common, rare, or epic level espers on any draw, but the results are dictated by hidden probability values.
Age of Espers was soft launched on GooglePlay and achieved a 4.3 out of 5 user review score. Unfortunately, after six months, Age of Espers wasn't able to keep up with rising user-acquisition costs, and so it was frozen indefinitely.