Hello, Metal Gladiators! I’m Bruno Freitas, Game Designer at Hoplon. I am one of those responsible for the development of the Ranked Mode, the feature we recently launched at HMM!
The Ranked Mode consists of a match search queue separated from the casual one. This mode has its own ranking and scoring system, aiming to evaluate and rank players according to their skill level.
Considering that Heavy Metal Machines is a competitive game, a Ranked Mode was necessary for the product’s success. So far we had features such as the Leaderboard and Metal League to fuel the competition, but Ranked Mode is the backbone of every competitive game, and HMM would always be an incomplete product until it had its own.
So we started by dissecting the Ranked Mode from other competitive games, analyzing how and why they do what they do. After that, we analyzed what the specific needs for HMM in a system like this were, and then we began to assemble the system skeleton. After having the basis of how everything would work, we developed a simulation for this system. There we populated with fake players of different skill levels and thus tested different rank and queue configurations. After finding a configuration that seemed to meet all the requirements of the game, we moved to the active development of what we had been previously designing, to then finally implement it.
The most significant difficulty in developing HMM’s Ranked Mode was to design a system that would work for our players today. It was necessary to develop a system that could form balanced matches, but not leaving a significant part of the players in the queue for a long time. Making a long story short, we developed a matchmaking and ranking simulation, in which we had hundreds of fake players playing thousands of matches until we found score formulas that met the needs of HMM’s Ranked Mode.
The Ranked Mode was released to the public on July 24th, and we completed the tests on July 20th. For this system, I acted as a Game Designer and Product Owner. The interface part was up to the designers Camila Linhares and Marcelo Bernardo. In the programming side, we had the developers Alexandre Beber and Fernando Toigo implementing it, and the programmer Vitor Rozsa working in the Backend part. An honorable mention to SD Stefano who participated temporarily alongside the backend.
See you in the arenas, and see you soon!