I Am Machine · Oskar Bing

A premium PC action game at Nordcurrent. I came in late — first internal playtests had just started — and worked on addressing the issues that surfaced under real play.

What I worked on

Balance. Playtest feedback drove a long pass on combat balance — enemy damage, weapon scaling, encounter pacing.
Feature redesign. A few systems needed enough rework that “tweak” wasn’t sufficient. I led the redesigns of those.
2D-to-3D-to-2D pipeline shift. Mid-development the team moved from hand-drawn 2D sprite characters to 3D character models that were rendered back out to sprites for runtime. The intent was animation variety at a sustainable production cost.
8-directional combat — the hard one. With characters rendered from 3D, every animation needs separate frames per facing direction. 8 directions is a common compromise — cheaper than 16, which would feel almost continuous — but in combat the discrete jumps between facings are visible. Your character snaps between 45° increments while tracking enemies, and it reads as chunky. We worked on smoothing the transitions and on combat logic that minimised rapid facing changes, but the underlying constraint stayed.

What I took from it

Coming onto a project late with playtest feedback as the brief is its own discipline. You’re not designing the game; you’re patching what surfaced under real play. The skill is figuring out which complaints point to a real systemic problem worth investing in and which would dissolve with another pass of polish. A different shape of work from greenfield design — useful in different contexts.