Unannounced AAA Project
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The Game
The project is a unique AAA co-op open-world action adventure game, and unfortunately most of it is NDA so I can share limited details only. The publisher pulled back the project, and the entire (100+) team at Free Range Games was let go.
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My Role
I was the senior technical designer on the project.
The project faced many challenges by the time I joined early on in production.
1. For my first major contirbution - I was responsible for completely owning and rebuilding the questing system. The game had a unique premise, and as such questing was a lot more complex than traditional open-world and linear games, and the system had to take that into account. I leveraged the company's finite state machine system to build this on top - alongside the accompanying designer-facing tool for quest creation to simplify and automate as much of the process possible. It was a large-scale system that had to communicate with every other system in the game, and as such I had an overview, and a hand in how other systems were being implemented technically as well. I was told repeatedly that the resulting questing system was one of the most stable, modular, functional systems in the game that anyone could add to easily. I was the go-to person for quest implementation questions, and helped with implementation of a majority of the quests.
2. I pitched and drove the design for the marker systems - what kinds of markers we'd have, what their rulesets would be, how to interface with them etc.
3. Was the design owner for the dynamic content system, which would spawn dynamic content (short quests, random side content) depending on world state.
4. I worked on the NPC handling systems, alongside trying to drive the technical implementation for the backend for this: data, spawning, overrides, interfacing with narrative systems etc.
5. I prototyped and implemented in a scalable manner multiple gameplay mechanics, metroidvania gates and such.
6. I set up technical design standards for all designers to follow, maintained detailed documentation, mentored other designers (both technical and non-technical), reviewed Blueprints, sometimes code (from engineers) and pushed for setting up review processes to ensure standards.
7. Due to content needs later on, I was responsible for owning, pitching, designing side quests with the quest team for specific story beats, working alongside the narrative designers.
The project faced many challenges by the time I joined early on in production.
1. For my first major contirbution - I was responsible for completely owning and rebuilding the questing system. The game had a unique premise, and as such questing was a lot more complex than traditional open-world and linear games, and the system had to take that into account. I leveraged the company's finite state machine system to build this on top - alongside the accompanying designer-facing tool for quest creation to simplify and automate as much of the process possible. It was a large-scale system that had to communicate with every other system in the game, and as such I had an overview, and a hand in how other systems were being implemented technically as well. I was told repeatedly that the resulting questing system was one of the most stable, modular, functional systems in the game that anyone could add to easily. I was the go-to person for quest implementation questions, and helped with implementation of a majority of the quests.
2. I pitched and drove the design for the marker systems - what kinds of markers we'd have, what their rulesets would be, how to interface with them etc.
3. Was the design owner for the dynamic content system, which would spawn dynamic content (short quests, random side content) depending on world state.
4. I worked on the NPC handling systems, alongside trying to drive the technical implementation for the backend for this: data, spawning, overrides, interfacing with narrative systems etc.
5. I prototyped and implemented in a scalable manner multiple gameplay mechanics, metroidvania gates and such.
6. I set up technical design standards for all designers to follow, maintained detailed documentation, mentored other designers (both technical and non-technical), reviewed Blueprints, sometimes code (from engineers) and pushed for setting up review processes to ensure standards.
7. Due to content needs later on, I was responsible for owning, pitching, designing side quests with the quest team for specific story beats, working alongside the narrative designers.