Project Scorpio

Project Description

Project Scorpio(working title) is a multiplayer GaaS shooter. This project is currently still in development and falls under NDA. Therefore a lot of the things I did, cannot be disclosed.

I worked on this project from its ideation phase

Main responsibilities

Because of the high value of my contributions to the team, I was brought on this project as sole designer. Therefore I have had a variety of responsibilities. After 6 months we expanded the design team to 3 people and a few months after that to 7 people.

Game Design

I designed and implemented the traversal metrics gym, set and iterated on all the metrics to create the unique intended game feel. For this, I worked closely with our animators and created a modular system that automatically updated the gym objects to the metric numbers when changed.
I created the AI behavior gym to set up automated testing for our AI behaviors. This allowed us to easily find bugs and what behavior needed to be created.
I designed and created the shooting metrics gym which allowed fast and modular testing of shooting metrics.

Level design

As we had no level designers on the team, I decided to take it upon myself to create the levels. For this, I closely worked with the level artist.
This was a continuous process of iteration to create the intended level flow working from level ideas, to spaces, to layouts also creating features that add to the level experience.
Due to the game not being released, I cannot share any images of these levels.

Game production

When our design team started growing, we didn't have a game producer and therefore I took it upon myself to create short and long-term planning and create tasks with priorities for all designers.
I created documentation for how to write feature documents and set up the confluence pages for design and their structure. This helped speed up the process of feature design and approval and helped faster establish a vision.
I created the pipelines for oncoming level designers and level artists and set up documentation of the design language we use as well of our custom tools.

Valued Experiences

I was involved in this project from the concept phase as sole designer. This allowed me to get a great deal of experience on early stage development and fast iteration

One thing I struggled most with during this project was the lack of communication. While I was the only designer, I was used to getting tasks or directions on what to do. However, since there were many unknowns and everybody worked remote, it took time for people to respond to my questions.

I solved this by taking a lot of initiative and work with anything I am given and creating features that would help us in the long term until there was a more defined direction from the directors.

I didn't get feedback or learning goals even though I am a junior.

One thing I am grateful for was the opportunity to diversify myself. I did system design, level design and production.