About
This is my most recent professional work, which has just been announced, but I am waiting for confirmation on what I’m allowed to disclose.
[????????] is a game made in Unreal Engine 5, and as the name suggests, has the player take on the role of a [????????] while they maintain and explore a large, open world [??????????].
Disclaimer
Before I go on, I need to clarify that I worked on the game for one year with [????????] before we suddenly stopped working on the project and many of us were laid off. This was a very unexpected turn of events, as work on the game was going well, and we were proud of our progress.
I’m afraid that I can’t talk about the specific circumstances, but they are nothing that would surprise those familiar with the industry. I hold no ill will towards [????????], they were a wonderful studio that I enjoyed working for, and I would happily return to work with them again in the future.
So 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 during the first year of development while I was working on it.
My Contributions
I worked on this project 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