Ilya Firsov – Sobaka Studio Kiborg Game Designer Portfolio

In the development of Kiborg, I had a variety of responsibilities:

• Designed procedural generation systems
• Designed rogue-lite gameplay mechanics, including power-ups, random events, combat modifications, etc
• Balanced almost every core system in the game
• Designed the final boss encounter
• Enhanced the overall game feel by working with the camera, controls, and UX
• Designed an endless game mode
• Contributed to post-release patches

I was responsible for designing flexible generation systems that supported a wide variety of content. A key goal was to create high replayability without relying solely on randomness, ensuring that generated runs felt intentional and fair while still delivering surprise and variety.

The system handled procedural generation for:

• Combat encounters, including enemy waves, room rewards, combat modifiers (e.g., traps, turrets), and boss/miniboss encounters
• Random events, such as shops, special rooms, and gameplay events
• Adaptive logic, through hidden weight modifiers (e.g., increased chance of healing events when the player is low on health)
• Multi-floor structure, with floor-specific enemy pools, locations, rewards, and event types

Designed the game’s final boss encounter, aimed at delivering a climactic, skill-based challenge for a wide range of player builds:

• Designed and documented all boss mechanics and attacks
• Collaborated with the combat designer during the boss production stage
• Balanced everything from attack cooldowns to detailed parameters like projectile speed and explosion radius
• Tweaked animation montages to improve telegraphing and pacing
• Designed a dynamic boss armor mechanic to provide a meaningful challenge for both balanced and overpowered player builds
• Iterated on the boss post-release (1, 2)

I was responsible for balancing almost every core system in the game

• Balanced the player, 24 enemy types, 10 mini-bosses, and 3 bosses
• Tuned procedural generation across seven difficulty levels
• Balanced 62 melee weapons, 64 ranged weapons, and 133 modifications
• Adjusted 56 implants, 140 augmentations, and 63 mutators to support varied rogue-lite builds
• Balanced over 140 meta-progression upgrades and the in-game economy
• Contributed to many other interconnected systems across multiple gameplay layers

The game relied heavily on Unreal Engine Data Tables for storing balance values, and manual editing proved time-consuming and inefficient. To address this, I migrated the majority of balancing work into structured Google Sheets and implemented a pipeline for exporting directly to CSVs compatible with Unreal’s Data Tables.

This setup enabled:

• Formula-driven calculations that fetch balance data across systems
• Automated data export, minimizing copy-paste and manual errors
• Bulk edits, allowing fast and reliable large-scale balance changes

As a result, the balance workflow became significantly faster, allowing for more frequent internal playtests and enabling a greater degree of experimentation during development.

I was doing some post-release support: polishing balance, designing features for content updates, and handling general polish. As an example of my work, you can check this patch note. The following highlights reflect six days of my work:

• Green highlights indicate changes I implemented personally
• Yellow highlights indicate changes I initiated, but their technical implementation was handled by engineers