"Not The Brightest Knight" is an arena survival game where you play as the arena itself! I was the designer and programmer in a 2 person team for the development of "Not The Brightest Knight." It was a goal of mine to create a feeling of "organized chaos" - the situation should be out of control for the player, but they should have some amount of influence on the outcome of gameplay. To that end, I decided that the player should not play as the protagonist directly, but should instead be trying to support them and keep them alive.
It was very interesting to develop a variety of different spells that the player could use to try to keep the knight alive. Some were created to directly influence the knight's movement, such as the hedge or the ice, while others were created to solve specific problems that arose in playtesting, such as the random teleport to get the knight out of tricky situations or corners or the buff to more easily take on stronger enemies.
Balancing the enemies for the game was also a fun challenge. Finding the right progression to increase their difficulty as the player's score rose was key to keeping the player engaged while not overwhelming them at the start of the game. I settled on increasing difficulty in two ways. First, by increasing enemy health and thus allowing more enemies to build up on the field over time, and second, by introducing additional types of enemies that the player would need to think about, such as the spear skeleton which can deal a bonus attack against the player or the bat which can fly over hedges and ice. This way, the increase in difficulty did not just result in the player needing the play the same strategy better, but forced them to mix up how they approached enemies as the game progressed.
The final design change I made after playtesting was to adjust when certain cards become available to the player, and how often they are drawn from the deck. Buffs were useless early in the game and playtesting revealed that the random teleport was not often necessary until the game became more chaotic, so the former only becomes available to the player later in the game and the latter increases the chance of being drawn as difficulty increases. These changes ensure that the player's hands weren't being bogged down with useless spells. While the player's hand is random, they should have higher odds of drawing useful cards to maximize available strategies and prioritize fun.
Thank you to Zoe Blank for creating the art assets for "Not The Brightest Knight."