Fio Leukert

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• View on Steam

Dome Keeper

Overview
- Bippinbits team size: 4 - 5 (10+ including freelancers)
- Worked on the project for 11 months full-time & 3 months during prior internship
- Developed in Godot 3
- Commercially successful

Description
Dome Keeper is a 2D mining / tower defense roguelike, in which players defend their Dome from waves of incoming monsters. Outside of combat, players venture into the mines below to retrieve resources.
It has over 9000 Steam reviews (90%+ positive), and is developed by Bippinbits and published by Raw Fury.

Responsibilities and Learnings
Telemetry Analysis
My first task at Bippinbits was the self-directed learning of KQL and subsequent evaluation of player telemetry that was collected via playfab and stored in a Microsoft Azure data base. I authored KQL queries and presented them within the integrated Azure Data Explorer dashboard to better visualize our findings.
Over the course of this task, the motivators behind creating these queries and interpreting their results came from both team members and myself.

Next to this work in Azure Data Explorer, I also programmed various features, which found integration through other team members.

Core Takeaways
Throughout my time at Bippinbits, making myself familiar with work and architecture built up by others was one of my regular activities. All of my programming tasks revolved around expanding existing systems or working within their defined constraints.

Within the Team
Active participation in team discussions and showcases / evaluation of work during weeklies were activities to which I readily added my own viewpoints. Voicing and critiquing divergent opinions is a skill I refined during my time here.

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oracle of thorns

Note: Pictures of game pieces are in German, translations will be provided

Overview
- Team size: 6 (2 game designers)
- Student project
- Dev time: 1 semester (~5 months)

Description
Oracle of Thorns is a physical tabletop game for 2 to 6 players who battle each other and game-controlled events in a race to the finish line.

Responsibilities and Learnings
Game Design
As the team lead for 5 other people, it was important to create a development environment for everyone to enjoy partaking in, so that we may create a pleasant gameplay experience for our players. As a PvPvE game, balancing the game-driven events and making each character class feel unique and powerful was an interesting challenge that we conquered successfully.Mechanical Density
The structure of a single game for a single player is roguelike-esque, in that players establish a build across the entire playtime. Finding ways to encourage different strategies without mechanical parasitism or a stagnant optimal play pattern posed a difficult but controllable challange for our game design.

Playtesting
Along with one other team member, we held responsibility for conducting playtests. We gained experience with protocolling and communicating changes, examining causes of gameplay problems, and adjusting game mechanics to address those issues effectively.Iterative Rule Design
As a physical tabletop game, Oracle of Thorns has no code forcing player actions, so the written rules needed to be clear and unambiguous on their own, while fitting within the manual. Over numerous revisions, the manual evolved to a point where it can resolve virtually all corner cases and game states, while also being easy to understand. As such, the manual includes:
- A QnA section where edge cases were resolved / explained
- A breakdown of how multiple simultaneously played cards are resolved
- A shortened version of the color identities

examples of design

Character Colors
We identified 4 avenues for Players to excell at: PvP (red), PvE (yellow), resource manipulation (blue), and board movement (green). This led to the creation of six characters, each with a unique color combination, which are utilized for card effects.

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• Dialog System Source

DIISIS Dialog System

Since October 2023 I have been working on a bespoke dialog / visual novel system, named DIISIS, for plugin use in Godot 4. By now a total of five visual novels, with a sixth in production, use this system to present their narrative to the player. (And sometimes provide choices to impact the narrative.)

▮ little to no character dialogue - ◉ player choice - ▼ adult content (violent) - ▽ adult content (sexual)

The system is currently actively in development, with tests being conducted through my own work and fellow Godot developers.DIISIS implements a boolean fact system inspired by Firewatch, allowing for dynamic and branching dialog.I presented my experiences and motivations while working on this dialog tool in a talk at GodotCon 2024.

further reading

• Narrative Design
• making diisis

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• DIISIS
• Dialog System Source

making diisis

It started in 2023 with the simple idea of "I want to make my own dialogue system."
I haven't stopped since.

DIISIS is my longest-running pet project to date. As a plugin in Godot 4, it can access all that engine's powerful features, while also giving me the freedom to rapidly implement whatever I want.

repo maintenance

Wiki
As I templatized the visual novels (VNs) I was building with DIISIS, I put more effort into making that VN template easy to pick up to reduce production overhead during game jams. This led to creating a wiki on GitHub, where I eventually started writing and maintaining documentation for myself and others. This also helped keeping up with the increasing feature complexity of DIISIS.

Issues
Over time, I started finding more testers to use DIISIS. This has provided me with hands-on experience using the more managerial side of GitHub, such as issues.

coding by use case

Leveraging the fact that I initially built DIISIS only for myself, I did not hold myself to constraints of pre-planned features. I implemented and refactored the system as I went, adding and improving aspects as I hit a roadblock where the respective improvements were necessary.

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• DIISIS
• Dialog System Source

Narrative Design

DIISIS is publicly available in the Godot Asset Library. As the sole writer on five visual novels, writing deep and impacting stories has always been a priority for me.
Giving distinct voices and memorable designs to characters is a related skill that I honed throughout these projects.

Onyx Heart

You can read more about my working processes and reflections on Onyx Heart's narrative design and project structure in this post mortem!

Embodied and disembodied voices

My writing has included character dialogue and prose without speaking roles. Both Growing Up and Curse you, Entropia make use of short blurb-like prose.

considerations

Both when writing dialogue and prose, I usually edit and iterate on any given line of text several times. Here I give attention to several factors, including:
- Semantics: Do the words communicate my exact intent?
- Time to read: Is the cadence of words and phrases relative to each other conductive to the feeling of the scene?
- Using the reader's brain: Which tacit knowledge can I tap into? Which details are better left to their imagination?
Fun Fact: Some of this also applies to when I write technical documentation!

Topics

My writing often tackles intimate and personal themes. As a marginalized queer person myself, I often write about the viscerality of the modern-day queer experience, and aim to have my peers find themselves in my writing.
Following these ethics, I also place great importance on the combating of stereotypes and empowerment of marginalized groups.

Living a varied life is instrumental to my writing process. Especially a very varied music taste, and participation in my own local music scene often inspire me.

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• play
• post mortem
• source code

Swagbot Vs Entropy

Overview
- Team size: solo
- Personal project for MechJam II game jam
- Game jam result: Position 4 of 77 entries
- Dev time: 5 days
- Engine: Godot 3

Description
Swagbot Vs Entropy is a turn-based card battler roguelike. The goal is to stack sensible combinations of fruit into your mech to defeat increasingly lethal enemy encounters.

Responsibilities and Learnings

UI Design and Player Feedback
Nonetheless, limited playtests were able to be conducted, which allowed me to refine the UX to a point where players could identify every sensible gamestate depending on the presentation of sensory output available to them.

More Iterative Design
Other examples of iterative design include the "rounding" of armor's damage reduction from 35% to 50% to make it more intuitive (with according re-balancing in the rest of the game) and the decision that the amount of time most testers spent with the game (~15 min) was sufficient for the scope of a game jam.

You can read more about my working processes and reflections on SvE's game design in this post mortem!

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• Play on Roblox

beatblocks / kluge interactive

Overview
- Beatblocks team size: 4
- Worked on the project since Summer 2024
- Developed in Roblox Studio

Description
Beatblocks is an asymmetric PvP multiplayer game, where players play as a DJ or as the Dancers. The DJ sends out obstacles that move across the dance floor, while the dancers try to stay alive and gain enough points to end up with a higher score than the DJ.
The game served primarily as testing ground for exploring all the unique traits of Roblox as a platform, including monetization and retention systems.

Responsibilities and Learnings
All-round Game Design
As junior game designer at Kluge Interactive, I was tasked with all game design-related aspects of the game Beatblocks. I wrote out documentation using Nuclino, communicated with game design leads on the optimization of our retention strategy, and lastly always tested the implementation of all our features and systems.

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Résumé

• Downloadable PDF
• Reach out to me!

professional Experience

Other Experience

Education

Sep 2019 - Jun 2023
B.Sc. at University of Applied Sciences Mittweida
- Part of the Game Design Dept of beta 2022
- Mentor for the Game Design Dept of beta 2023
- Student projects: Ampguard, Planets of Topology, Legally Distinct Block Game In Space!, Oracle of Thorns (physical game)Aug 2012 - May 2019
A-levels at Semper Gymnasium Dresden

My Proficiencies

GAME DESIGN

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Contact

You can find me online on itch.io and LinkedIn.
Or shoot me an email at leukert.fio@gmail.com.