Njords Embrace (2025)
About
Like in 'The Long Night' project, I served as the Technical Designer for Njords Embrace and was the main designer of the game's Turn Based Combat System.
The project was an evolution of previous games the studio had made, combining detailed worldbuilding and handcrafted branching narrative experiences with classic RPG mechanics and turn-based combat sequences but pared down to a smaller scope and speedier playtime but with lots of replayability within a run-based structure.
In the game, you play as Oluf, a middle aged viking, about to wed away your daughter Unn to a good man. The local Mord Valgardsson also wants to wed your daughter - two men end up dead and you get caught up in a blood feud. You flee Mord’s revenge and sail the fjords of Kattegat,
meet people and gods in disguise who will support you with skills and equipment, if you are able to gain their favour.
Project Info
Role:
Technical Designer, Combat Designer
Time Frame:
6 months
Team Size:
8-10
Tools Used:
Unity, Google Sheets, Miro
Trailer
Introduction
In this project, my main responsibility was to design and balance the game's core Combat System. This entailed:
Designing Combatant Abilities, which are delivered through the Items that the player can accrue during the game (Weapons, Equipment, Armor, Consumables etc.)
Designing the Combatant Stats and Attributes which would influence the efficacy of the above Abilities
Designing Enemy AI (Including Enemy Abilities) in legible Behavior flow charts to be implemented by the Tech team.
Designing all of the above towards several types of 'Builds' the player could choose to pursue in their choices of Items and Levelling up, keeping in mind satisfying Synergies that the player could experience with certain choices.
Key Features
Combat System
The development of this project was concurrent with 'The Long Night' and many of my tasks for this project were similar to that one - though with some key differences in the design of the combat system in order to give the games both a distinct identity. Rather than repeat myself about the similarities between the projects I will focus here on the more unique aspects of Njord's Embrace's gameplay and development.
Controlling Multiple Combatants
The story of Njord's Embrace centers on 3 Viking characters: Oluf (Main playable character), his daughter Unn (a Seer capable of the mystical practice of Seid), and Surt ( a strong 'Tanky' Uncle of Oluf). In Combat scenarios, you are able to play as all 3 of these characters one by one, and it is possible to distribute your main inventory in the game across the 3 of them in any way you like.
One of my challenges as a designer was to create a roster of Items and Abilities that could conceivably be distributed to any character while also having clear affinities towards certain characters and build types - e.g. creating Tanky but cumbersome abilities that would benefit Surt, or more ranged magic type abilities that would suit Unn, but could equally suit Oluf (the most neutral base character) if the player decided to build him more towards a magic using build.
Like for 'The Long Night' I found that creating an analog prototype for playtesting was an efficient and illuminating method of working out the kinks of this layer of character power and ability balancing.
Crowd Control and AoE Combos
Though 'The Long Night' also featured some aspects of Crowd Control and AoE (Area of Effect) attacks in the combat, in Njord's Embrace, it was an explicit wish of the Game Director that these aspects be core to the combat strategy. Specifically we wanted the player to be thinking of ways that they could maneuver and group enemies and then deliver impactful combos to take out several of them at once.
Both this project and 'The Long Night' were great learning experiences with regards to designing and scoping entire gameplay systems. I learned to be an integral part of the essential communication between Design and Tech, delivering detailed requirements about the various features that we needed the Tech team to implement. This iterative back and forth is a process that can easily get very messy and potentially waste a lot of production hours if different departments are not properly aligned so I found this to be one of the most important aspects of my role.
Another big area of growth for me on these projects was in my ability to design Combat Systems across 2 projects which needed to share a lot of core features for practical production reasons, and yet give them their own unique identity so as not to feel like reskins of each other. I found myself looking to the core of each project's story and intended player experience to inform how to refine the Combat System in the game to enhance this vision.
Of course on top of these more abstract insights, I also learned a great deal about game design in general as well as Unity specific tools such as the Behavior Graph tool for Enemy AI, and Scriptable Objects etc.
What I Learned
