Swarm Nocturnal
Swarm Norcturnal is a minigame I majorly participated in many design aspects during my internship in Delta Force. It's based on an old RPG game, Magic Tower. The game served as the major event game of Season 7. It went online from 9/22/2025 to 11/09/2025.
The First One Ever
Swarm Nocturnal is the first mini game that had full gameplays and levels. Before making this, the team had little experience with the scope and pipeline of this project. We struggled to find different production solutions and eventually successfully launched the mini game.
The First Anniversary Event
Swarm Nocturnal is also the main event of Delta Force's first anniversary. In this game with 30M DAU, We all know creating satisifying events will determine the anniversary experience. With the later cut-down on other events in Season 7, Swarm Nocturnal became more important.
Cross IP Collaboration:
Arknights
At the same time, this event is also IP based- it required envolvement of characters, stories, and world settings of Arknights.
IP narrative can be dangerous as fandom might be upset about disconsistency. I've spent my free time started playing Arknights, trying to create satisfying stories for both IP players.
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Magic Tower>
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Learn the Game
Magic Tower, the original game, and its later fandom games are all System and Level Design heavy. In order to better design levels, I spent time completing the original game and played some other games of this kind.
Narrative Design
This game is also narrative heavy. There's a long storyline describing how Swamp got into the trouble and resolve it with the help of Arknight's operators. During the process, I was in charge of writing side quests, making the process fun with jokes.
Level Reference
To make the level easy to distinguish, we chose Delta Force's map, Brakkesh, as game level reference. I carefully went through the level in the editor and chose notable environmental elements for the level.
Automation
Another major thing I've done was automation. We did all of our design work on excel sheets: we list all the enemies, collectables, and other things in the excel sheet and unreal will read the data. I made automation sheets that can reference other sheets, making it easier to design out of engine.
Design Levels
I designed all the levels using Excel Sheets, because they are useful for tile-based levels. During the level design process, I spent long time playtesting the routes and decision points because Magic Tower itself is all about route choices
Debugging
As the first mini game of Delta Force, there are a lot of bugs in the game while making it. One of my daily routine was QA on my own game and list all the bugs, figuring out if they are caused by designers or programmers and report them.
System Design
After finishing the level designs, I spent more time designing the stats and positions of all the enemies, also tried to figure out the best stats for upgrades and purchases to make a smooth upgrading experience during the game.
Collaboration
Without a good collaboration, this project could not be finished. My tutor helped me a lot in the design process, guiding me to the industry standards. I also spent a lot of time collaborating with the art and programming team.
After The Launch
When the game launched, it gained attention from millions of players. The most watched guide video even got 2.6M views on Bilibili. Players are interested in this major event and showed unique engagement because this is finally a mini game, other than UI-based event with interactions.
However, this event still had a mixed review. First, the game mode of Magic Tower itself is difficult, requiring precise route choices and upgrade decisions. Second, User Experience was not polished in the game, for example, clicking exit button will exit the game without saving, because our data structure didn't allow that.
After all, I think I did a great job. Making something that was enjoyed by millions of players made me feel proud, feeling that I can spread my creativity to a larger audience.