About
This is my most recent professional work which has just released and is now available to play.
Ranger’s Path was made in Unreal Engine 5, and as the name suggests, has the player take on the role of a Park Ranger who will maintain and explore a large, open world National Park.
Disclaimer
Before I go on, I need to clarify that I worked on the game only for its first year of development, whilst employed by Skyhook Games.
I’m afraid that I can’t go into much detail about the specifics, but they are nothing that would surprise those familiar with the industry. Skyhook Games were a wonderful studio that I really enjoyed working for, and I would happily return to work with them again in the future.
My Contributions
Please note that I cannot say with any authority what the contents of the game are, I can only comment on my own contributions and responsibilities, although many of my designs and ideas can be seen in the current version. I worked on ‘Project Bear’ for over a year within a team of 50 people. As one of only a few Game Designers, I undertook many responsibilities, including the following:
- Researching various topics to influence the designs of relevant features, the most complex of which is animal behaviour to be simplified for animal behaviour systems.
- Writing a large majority of the Game Design Document to a high standard, as well as maintaining the GDD’s space in Confluence.
- Ownership over designs for the World Map, Tool Systems, Animal Systems, Progression Systems, GUI, and Input Designs.
- Ensuring designs accounted for single player and multiplayer gameplay.
- Writing narrative to describe the world, its history, as well as NPC dialogue and quest stories to ensure that the player remains immersed and invested.
- Chairing project-wide meetings to discuss complex systems and how to implement their designs with department leads.
- Running a daily stand-up meeting for nine team members, including production, audio, narrative, and GUI designers.
- Regular meetings to discuss and iterate on designs with other departments.
- Addressing and responding to publisher feedback when necessary.
- Managing Jira tasks, creating and assigning them for myself and others to assist with production and planning.
- Ensuring PlayStation TRCs are upheld at the design stage to minimise future Certification issues.
Tool Familiarity
While working on this project I have also gained a lot of experience with a variety of professional tools including:
- Unreal Engine 5
- Perforce
- Confluence
- Jira
- Houdini
Credits
The team are credited under ‘Project Bear Development Team’ with myself credited as ‘Game Designer’.
