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Mist Weavers is an action Survivor-like game featuring a unique twist on the genre: Dual-Control gameplay, where the player controls their character while simultaneously commanding a familiar to attack enemies around them.

I lead the team as Game Designer, Producer, and Creative Director, managing the GDD, balancing the gameplay experience, directing the art team toward a cohesive visual identity, designing missions, and managing the project's scope and development.

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Into The Design

01 - From Action Roguelike to Survivor-like

Mist Weavers began as a very different game: an Action Roguelike inspired by games like Hades. Its core mechanic was controlling the character with WASD while independently directing an orb with the mouse, creating two entities that the player had to position simultaneously.

As the Survivor-Like genre gained traction, we realized this mechanic could address one of the things we found lacking in the genre: Direct Player Interaction.

We enjoyed games like Vampire Survivors, but found their largely automated combat lacked the depth and moment-to-moment decision making we looked for as players. We wanted to combine the accessibility and scale of the genre with an additional layer of control: managing the positioning of both the character and their familiar.

This became the Foundation of Mist Weavers: a Survivor-Like built around active positioning, where movement and familiar control create a constant relationship between the player's position, their abilities, and the enemies surrounding them.

02 - From Idea to Implementation

01 - Idiation & Feature Definition

As Lead Game Designer & Producer, I take features from initial ideas through implementation and iteration.

I break down design problems, prototype solutions, communicate requirements across disciplines, and iterate based on testing and feedback.

02 - Prototype Testing & Developer Handoff

03 - Art Direction & Iterations

04 - Implementation

Feature Example - Hunter's Mark Ability

01 - dESIGNING THE hEALTH sYSTEM

Case Studies

Unlike many games in the genre, Mist Weavers gives players direct control over a familiar that travels anywhere instantly to damage multiple enemies. This allowed us to introduce large enemy groups much earlier in a run.

The Problem
With a traditional health bar, players could often escape dangerous situations simply by running away until the screen filled with enemies, then clearing them with AoE. Dying only when completely overwhelmed felt less like a consequence of poor positioning and more like a delayed failure state.

We experimented with a heart-based system inspired by 20 Minutes Till Dawn, where taking damage consumes a heart and knocks back nearby enemies, giving the player an opportunity to reset their position.

Testing revealed two problems:

  • Combat Problem
    Our larger enemy counts and requirement for precise familiar positioning made each hit highly consequential. Losing an entire heart from a minor positioning mistake felt disproportionately punishing.

  • Progression Problem
    With only three or four hearts, we had little room for granular health scaling or incremental healing during a run.

The Solution
Instead of making every hit equally severe, we turned specific health thresholds into gameplay events.

Fractured Health combines the simplicity of a traditional health bar with the high-impact moments of a heart system. The bar is divided into segments, crossing a threshold knocks back nearby enemies and grants temporary invulnerability, creating a deliberate opportunity to reposition.

Small mistakes still matter, but reaching a threshold creates a moment of relief rather than simply removing a large portion of the player's health.

The segmented structure also gives us greater control over progression, allowing maximum health and additional thresholds to be introduced in smaller increments through meta-progression.

02 - Creating meaningful familiar movement

I wanted familiar movement to involve more than simply finding the path that hits the most enemies. Rocks introduce environmental constraints that force players to balance damage output with safe positioning.

To keep the interaction readable during chaotic combat, I also gave rocks a strong visual hierarchy through bright tones and their own lighting set.

I expanded the mechanic beyond a static obstacle. Rock Bender enemies can dynamically create rocks around the player, while picking up Horns with the familiar lets the it break its next rock without being stunned.

Together, these interactions turn rocks into a dynamic system that can create both threats and opportunities.

Playtesting revealed that rocks could sometimes stun the familiar after it had moved off-screen, making the cause unclear.
We also found that being stunned twice by the same rock felt less like a skill-based punishment and more like frustration.

I am changing the interaction so the familiar breaks the next rock it encounters after being stunned, preventing consecutive collisions while preserving the intended movement challenge.

03 - Dashing without a dash

A dash is almost a default in the genre. A simple, reliable tool for escaping danger and repositioning.
But Mist Weavers is built around a fundamentally different control relationship. The familiar is the primary damage source, while the player is the vulnerable entity that must survive while simultaneously directing it.

A player-centered dash therefore created an unusual problem. It pulls the player's attention away from their primary offensive tool and potentially moves the vulnerable entity into danger. I found that this made the dash feel disconnected from the game's core identity.

So I REMOVED IT

Playtesting revealed that removing the dash also removed an important defensive tool. Players still wanted a way to make decisive repositioning choices when surrounded. Since we already had complex controls compared to other games in the genre, we wanted to give players this additional control.

Rather than restoring the conventional dash, we introduced Glide as a third active control alongside WASD movement and familiar aiming. Its longer duration and lower burst allow players to navigate through the surrounding battlefield without aggressively pulling attention away from the familiar or turning movement into another potentially dangerous, offensive tool.