Unannounced Strategy-RPG Hybrid Game – Palindrome Interactive – — Filip Andersson

In my second year at Palindrome, I was transferred to the main project of over 30 developers.
This game had a big development cycle behind it and grand ambitions, so my transfer goal was to, together with a new producer, focus its development on a playable and sellable experience.

My responsibilities:

Design Manager: “Strategy” pipeline, taking the game from a linear experience to a repayable living world with a dynamic economy and events
Game Direction: redefining the vision with PO and CD and communicating the redesigned vision to all managers
Content writing: reimagining the lore to be consistent and logical to fit the original pitch
World Design: imagining, concepting and implementing a dynamic world influenced by the lore.
System Design: using the reimagined vision to create a living economy of which the game mechanics interacted with

Over the next 6 months, this game went from a collection of ideas and prototypes to a playable game with hours of potential.
This was made with a teamwide effort to workshop, innovate, and reiterate mechanics, systems, and looks to fulfill the original idea of the game while also being fun to play.

My position was technically just game designer with responsibility over the “Strategy” pipeline. However, it soon became a pseudo-leadership position in the manager group. Here, I led the team of managers to coordinate all task forces, pipelines, and devs to steer toward a common target. That target was set by the combined efforts of me the PO and CD.
I still had hands-on design tasks regarding economy design, world design, and lore, but the efforts became a directing role rather than a developing one.

The game slowly developed a unique experience combining many genres of RPG and strategy games. It lets players experience a harsh world filled with crime, gangs, and an ever-changing society.

Unfortunately, the project was paused to bring forward the development of Shadowveil.

If you want to see more or get documentation examples, contact me!

Below, you see concepts or screenshots!