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Overview
Fights in Tight Spaces (2021) is a grid-based deckbuilding rogue-like. In this game, you play as a British secret service agent tasked with eliminating various criminal elements around the world. You develop a deck of cards, each one giving you new options for moving around the confined environments, managing your resources and attacking your enemies.
Developer: Ground Shatter
Publisher: Mode 7
Platforms: Steam, Epic Games, GoG, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch
Awards:
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BAFTA Game Awards 2022 - Nominated for Best British Game
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Develop:Star Awards 2022 - Nominated for Best Game Design, Best Original IP
My Involvement
My responsibilities included:
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Building, maintaining and iterating upon all of the game's systems
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Providing tools to facilitate the creation of game content and promotional material
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Enemy, ability and tutorial design
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Writing events and character dialogue
Base Game
I joined Ground Shatter as the second programmer in 2019, when development on Fights in Tight Spaces was already underway. We had a limited prototype of gameplay across a handful of environments - enough to demonstrate the intent of the design and fundamental systems without having a complete game loop in place.
My focus started on the UI and the metagame, including player progression in both a single session and the long term. When our lead programmer left at the end of 2020, I took on a much broader role and became responsible for managing all of the game's systems, while bringing the new programming lead up to speed on the codebase. Over the course of the project, my work included the cards and their myriad abilities, entities, environments, animations, audio, levels, procedural generation, UI for front end and gameplay, progression, rewards, saving and loading, building editor tools and back-end code for managing leaderboards.
Much of Fights in Tight Spaces was developed simultaneously with RICO: London. As part of a small programming team. I spent a great deal of time working on both games.
DLC
I became the sole programmer to work on its three DLC products from 2023 to 2025. There I continued all of my existing programming duties, and also took opportunities to go beyond them.
For Weapon of Choice, I acted as both a programmer and designer. This content introduced the ability to use a pistol, which required a whole new set of cards. I programmed the gameplay systems to facilitate the switching of weapon stances, and I designed most of the cards that were critical to playing with a pistol deck. Many of these cards saw new life in our next game, Knights in Tight Spaces, where they were used for a bow instead of a firearm.
This DLC introduced three new enemies: the Cutthroat, the Gas Masker and the Assassin Boss. The first two were "guest" enemies who each had three phases, and the last was the final boss of the DLC story. I conceptualised these enemies, developed their movesets and implemented them for gameplay.
Agent 11 is flanked by the Assassin Boss and a Gas Masker
Weapon of Choice also added new story content and events. I wrote some of the character dialogue that plays at the start of fights in which the aforementioned guest enemies appear, for them and the player character. In addition, I wrote eleven events included with this DLC that appear at random throughout a player's session, posing multiple-choice narrative challenges that offer both risk and reward.
Agent 11 sets his dog on members of a razor gang
Our team had expanded significantly by the time we returned for our next DLC, K-9 Division. I performed all the technical design and implementation work to allow the player to take and command a dog companion, and I acted as a co-designer on the new cards, gameplay mechanics and the dog itself.
I also designed two new tutorial levels that introduced the player to the dog. Using pre-existing environments, I designed a flow that introduces new mechanics at a steady pace and wrote the pop-up text that teaches the player how to play, within the narrative context of saving the dog from an abusive gang.
The third and final DLC, Frights in Tight Spaces, is a Halloween-themed package intended to be less ambitious than the previous installments, developed by a very small team within the studio. My role on this project was focused on implementing a multitude of environmental traps, adding various features to support new enemy designs, and porting mechanics we liked from Knights in Tight Spaces back into FITS.
Agent 11 is startled by a skeleton jumping out of a tomb
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