Wayfinder

Players team up to fight through randomized dungeons, over a hundred different enemies and 21 unique dungeon boss fights.

Website

Genre: 3rd person ARPG

Team: Airship Syndicate, 100 Employees

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

 

Responsibilities

Systems and Technical

  • Outlined tooling needs for creatures across the game

    • New proprietary score-based AI system and its best practice uses

    • Data tables for specific fights for quick iteration and balance updates

    • Best GAS practices for AI in a tag-based structure

  • Custom behavior trees for AI that exist outside the paradigm tooling.

  • Event scripting for boss fights best practices and tooling

  • Onboarded and guided multiple combat designers on the project.

  • Liaison with all departments throughout the project for a wide spectrum of AI needs.

Boss Design

  • Designed, prototyped, polished, and updated 12 hand-scripted bosses across the game including the 3 of act finales in the game.

  • Maintained a further 4 existing boss fights

  • Designed an additional 4 that were overtaken by other designers or covered under NDA.

  • Created and upkept documentation on each boss fight. As well as testing and other boss technical documentation.

  • Responded to live player feedback to improve and streamline boss fights including balance, bugs, and design flow.

Creature Design

  • Designed, prototyped, and shipped over 50 creatures in the game

  • Curated factions and enemy classes across the game for encounter design in a procedural environment.

  • Supported encounter/event/quest design needs with numerous unique creatures and scriptable behaviors.

  • Documented a large spectrum of creatures individually and maintained a wider matrix.

Team Liaison

I worked on a day-to-day basis with the player team to try and synergize our content to work well with each other regardless of if that was best practices on enemy impacts and damage or other smaller items. Similarly, with engineering, we discussed on a daily basis how to achieve certain goals and how to compromise in order to get the best results for what we needed tooling-wise.

I iterated with animation each creature I had a role in making to try and brainstorm new ideas, implement ideas for attacks others may have had, and iterate on animations for creatures that were needed. The documentation I created helped outline what animations were needed and for what creatures.

I helped set up various systems with VFX to aid with replication across the board quickly and efficiently and implement larger more specific cases for boss fights and events, trying to set up as many systems as I could to let VFX test effects out quickly. I also worked to implement our telegraphs for the game for AOE Indicators and outlined a set of debug particle systems we could as designers to quickly iterate on creatures.

Mentoring

For over a year I provided day-to-day guidance and onboarding training for 2 combat designers and 1 Creature Design Lead to get up to speed on our tools and practices.

  • Providing feedback sessions on creature designs and prototypes

  • Documenting tool needs for engineering and communicating with production and programming to get the needs scheduled

  • Onboarding processes and documentation

  • Facilitating meetings and playtests regularly to garner feedback on content

Retrospective

At Airship Syndicate while working on Wayfinder I learned very quickly how to iterate, design, and take a piece of content to shippable. I took over ownership of creatures as a whole and under a director's guidance helped to establish a baseline to get creatures to a shippable, polished state. I quickly found myself being a pivotal part of the team that could be of great use to many amazing developers throughout Wayfinder.

I found great joy in the technical and design challenges of combat including how the player package can interact with enemies to create a fun, repeatable experience for the player.

I grew to understand the importance of good systems, tools, and practices over the lifespan of a project specifically for live service and large-scale projects and more recently, box products that have room for more cinematic flare and a different type of content.