My role and biggest challenges

I joined the project at a crucial time: Only a few months to go until launch, the economic balance of the game was essentially nonexistant and a lot of polish was needed to smooth out the pacing. The team leads and upper management were afraid, that the game was just not coming together.

Over the course of 4 weeks I dug myself into the systems of the game, researching the original Evil Genius and its balance and tried to apply an entire balance pass over the first few hours of gameplay plus adding a few quality of life changes and adjustments to certain AI priorizitation.

The result was not only perceived very well by playtesters and the team, but upper management showed more confidence in the project, extending the development and the budget.

Until launch, I was not only continuing my work in overhauling, polishing, playtesting and tweaking the balance and gameplay loop, but I was also designing some new features to the core gameplay loop and designing major DLCs, including the Ocean Expansion, the new Lair, Submarines, the Workshop and several new Characters such as Doomhilda!

Tho, the structure of the game being a consistent base from start until the lategame without a reset of the base at any point as in the first game, caused severe problems in planing out the late game economy, this lead to criticism, that the balance was too close to mobile game city builder games due to spiralling costs, which were necessary to prevent the economy absolutely trivial very soon without any additional development time.

Biggest Accomplishments
– Highest amount of Pre-Orders of any self-published Rebellion title
– Highest number of sales within the first month of any self-published Rebellion title
– Nominated for Best Strategy Game at the Game Awards 2021