Wolfsbane
Newcastle Studio
Wolfsbane is a Unity-based tactical role-playing game currently in development by Newcastle Studio, of which I served as the Systems and Level Designer on its prototype from Jun 2025 – Dec 2025.
- Designed & iterated on 20 levels & environments based on executive playtesting feedback
- Used critical thinking to rapid-prototype design specifications & feedback in a timely manner
- Created & revised all major systems (stats, combat, economy, progression) via Google Sheets
Wolfsbane’s Catacombs Level
Overview
What made Wolfsbane unique is its necromancy gimmick, where you can revive enemy units to create a massive army to mow down your enemies. Additionally, what made Newcastle Studio itself unique is that it’s funded entirely by just one guy that wanted specific aspects he wanted the game systems to include, which the team needed to build around in order to both make engaging gameplay and keep our funder happy.
Game Systems
With Wolfsbane, a lot of its major systems work came in the form of the aforementioned combat and economy. Unfortunately didn’t get to go as in-depth as I wanted with any of these since I was spread so thin, but I feel like I did a fine job making them useful.
- Accomidated design specifications of large-scale enemy formations via unit compression, unit simplification, and balancing around AOE attacks
- Created & maintained balancing spreadsheets for:
- Unit & ability stats + combat damage calculations
- Equipment stats
- Loot pool
- Base-building mechanics (economy & scaling)
- Level progression (unit scaling, economy scaling, and game progression)
(I no longer have access to Wolfsbane’s Data Sheet, so I unfortunately can’t provide any specifics)
The first level I made for Wolfsbane, Village-1
Levels
I was actually hired onto Newcastle primarily for my ability to do both design and implementation work on levels, as they wanted to keep the dev team small during its prototyping phase.
- Designed & implemented18 normal-sized levels (30×30 grid) and 3 giant-sized levels (50×50 grid), populated with enemy encounters
- Redesigned levels numerous times to account for new systems design additions & changes
- Implemented all environments for those levels
UI
UI in strategy games is definitely not unimportant; menuing takes up a ton of time when it comes to those sorts of games (or at least it does for me), and it’s how you determine what your units are best at at a glance.
- Designed menu to be easily-navigatable and to not be overwhelming, since our funder preferred simple explanations, with extra information being presented as pop-ups
- Designed UI with blank space to support additional added mechanics
- Set up UI blocking in-game
Wolfsbane’s Level-Up Menu