Sacred Legends
Sacred Legends is a mobile free-to-play fantasy RPG of the long-running Sacred franchise. It features a gacha-driven economy and is based on eastern-RPG monetization principles.
- Clients: Deep Silver, Fishlabs, Plaion (Koch Media), Chimera Entertainment
- My Role: Game Designer
- Timeframe: 2015
- Platform: Mobile (iOS & Android)
- Genre: RPG (MRPG), Turn-based Tactics, Character Collector
- Technology Used: Unity
My Role
As a Game Designer I was responsible for the economy & progression for Sacred, as well as difficulty balancing (defining stages, waves, monsters).
My Responsibilities
- Established Economy Balancing: Setting up exhaustive balancing sheets (both Excel and Google Sheets) including all the functions, projections and diagrams to get a good grasp of the economy, difficulty and player progression
- Sources & Sinks: Modeling sources & sinks (permanent & temporary) for all currencies (soft currency, hard currency, evolution materials, etc.)
- Income vs. Cost breakdown and projections
- Currency source/sink projections for all major features: Quests, Gacha System, Stages, Merchant, Harvest Missions, Item sell, PvP fights, Daily login calendar, VIP system
- Additional sinks: Skill cost progression, Item prices, Spirit upgrade costs, Item enhance costs, Item evolution cost, Rune forge costs
- Difficulty Balancing: The goal was to guide new players, while progressively ramping up the difficulty.
- Stages: Structuring the layout of individual stages, setting up waves and monsters
- Waves: Building “sets” of monsters and spawning them in a cohesive manner
- Monsters: Creation of monster & boss types, definition of their stats (HP, damage, armor, etc.) and skills (active and passive)
- Play-testing: Thorough and focused play-testing of the story campaign to ensure a smooth progression of the economy and difficulty
You can see the game in action and some of my work below!
Game Description
“Ancaria is doomed and only you can save it! Face up to the Demon Lords and prevent them from opening the Gates of Hell in Sacred Legends, the new mobile RPG based on the renowned Sacred brand. Level up your hero, learn powerful skills, forge epic weapons, collect valuable loot and breach your way into the heart of the realm.
Form parties with your friends to master a challenging campaign in normal, veteran and elite difficulty or head off to the PvP arena to compete with other players. Prepare yourselves for the ultimate Sacred experience on smartphones and tablets!“
Store Description
Features
- Use unique skills to defeat evil legions & fight epic boss battles
- Recruit your friends to join your party
- Shape your hero, loot powerful gear and forge epic items
- Play as warrior, archer or seraphim
- Explore a vast game world full of wonder and danger
- Enjoy addictive gameplay and apt touchscreen controls
About the Author
Written by Steve Haßenpflug, a seasoned game designer with a strong product & technical background. His focus is on creating engaging games for companies that want big results.
Steve has developed top-grossing AAA games for IPs beloved by players around the world (Angry Birds, Trolls) with international companies (NBC Universal, DreamWorks, Rovio) and helped bootstrap gaming startups in the early stages of seeding. He’s an expert in mobile free-to-play mechanics.
He also manages GameDevGems, a resource that aims to help game developers to get better at making games through gamedev concepts, tutorials and techniques and is a passion-project of him.