OPEN WORLD DESIGN

HIGHLANDS

PRIMARY CONTRIBUTIONS

• Design layout for various POIs.
• Place combat encounters for entire Overland.
• Script ambient AI behavior.
• Work with Artists to address collision, sightline, and gameplay issues after art passes.
• Place locations for scripted events and collectible resources.
• Work with Quest Designers to place quests for their intended player level, narrative objectives, and rewards.

DESIGN INTENTIONS & CHALLENGES

      Highlands was the first zone that I worked on during my time at Airship. I joined shortly after production had started for Highlands as the primary level designer. Due to the constraints of Highland’s small world size, verticality was crucial. This verticality allowed the world to feel bigger, rewarded exploration, and provided varying connection points between macro spaces so that the player could keep moving. Dead ends were intentionally limited.

      Although verticality was something we prioritize it was also something we had to limit within combat areas. Since players have ranged weapon options and many enemies did not, it was important to ensure that environments provided clear paths for AI anywhere a player could get to.

      Within each of these spaces it was important to establish logical enemy compositions for different biomes. Water elementals near water, bandits near cities, bears near woodland type areas, etc. This provided both consistent areas to farm particular type of enemy drops but also gave the world a sense of believability.

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FROSTMARCH

PRIMARY CONTRIBUTIONS

• Create 2D/3D blockout for Overland.
• Determining placement and makeup of encounters for each sub area, what events would happen there, and the general cohesion from sub area to sub area.
• I worked multiple Artists to develop different themes for each sub area.
• I created an inventory of scripted events that the Overland would need and shared that with Event Designers to work on as they joined development.
• Work with designers of multiple disciplines to help guide specific area content needs ranging from scripted events, encounter refinements, and POI blockouts.
• Generate documentation for each area of the Overland to communicate goals and gameplay for stakeholders and QA.

DESIGN INTENTIONS & CHALLENGES

      Frostmarch is Wayfinder’s biggest zone, approximately twice the size of Highlands. I was given the opportunity to help drive level design from the beginning. I started sketching out a 2D topdown knowing that we wanted to go big with the map. Performance was of key importance due to the size. I aimed to always keep your FOV somewhat limited, using terrain and POIs to block LOS, and intentionally reduced wide open spaces.

      Once I got buy in for the topdown design, I moved into a 3D blockout stage. Here I focused on scale, pacing of POIs, and shaping the terrain. Breadth of the Wild was a big inspiration, and I tried to always have a landmark somewhere in player’s FOV. I created zone breakdowns for artists and a list of potential gameplay events to help artists to establish an identity for the spaces containing landmarks. This would help feed back into the type of gameplay and combat encounters that would live in a space.

      After the initial 3D blockout I completed an initial pass of combat encounters and drafted up a priority list of repeatable gameplay events that should be created for the zone. Due to what we learned on Highlands, we decided we wanted to lean more into repeatable gameplay events built for a specific landmark or its inhabitants. This helped drive home both the identity of a space but also rewarded the player with a unique play experience for discovering it. I worked with Dave Sullivan, Will Santos, and Dakota Loupe to develop and populate the map with these repeatable scripted events.

SCRIPTED EVENTS

PRIMARY CONTRIBUTIONS

• Take events from paper design all the way to ship.
• Create event actors that replicate in a multiplayer environment.
• Scripting encounters, event logic and visual state changes.
• Blockout of event space and world boss arena.

DESIGN INTENTIONS & CHALLENGES

      Seeds of Corruption is themed four staged repeatable event which culminates in a world boss fight. Zachery Wheeler was responsible for scripting and designing the boss fight. Stages one through three asked players to purge altar sites of enemies who were corrupting the area. After the third stage was complete a hole would open in the equidistant from the three altar sites and invite players into the world boss’s arena for the fourth and final stage.

      Originally, the event’s fail state would only trigger if players could not progress past the first stage otherwise you were to be rewarded for any progress you made in the event thereafter. This ensured that if you didn’t have the firepower or numbers to get to the World Boss you still received credit for the time you spent in the event. As Wayfinder transitioned into a Coop ARPG I decreased the difficulty of the event as the number of participants would always have a maximum of three and only granted partial event rewards if a player was able to complete the first three stages.

      The total play space for the event was quite large and in order to lead players from one stage to the next I placed a vortex above the active altar site, after an altar site was purged, the vortex would move to the next altar. I also force completed any remaining encounters near the purged altar and granted players a speed buff to make their travel to the next altar quicker.

Environmental Hazards

PRIMARY CONTRIBUTIONS

• Use Unreal’s GAS to create trap damage gameplay effects and difficulty scaling.
• Script all trap behaviors (Activation, Deactivation, Triggered, Looping, etc) using programmer supplied base classes.
• Audit every tile in dungeon set to evaluate best trap placements.
• Script traps together for complex chaining behaviors.

DESIGN INTENTIONS & CHALLENGES

      Traps in Wayfinder are primarily found in the randomly generated dungeons. They can be triggered or always on. They serve to keep the players on their toes and also provide a unique opportunity to deal damage to enemies as well. Initially, traps were not impactful enough and were often disregarded by players, as their damage and placement within the dungeon felt insignificant. To address this, I focused on polishing the visual and audio cues (tells), scaling the damage appropriately, and better integrating the traps within the tiles. I heavily relied on Unreal’s GAS system to distribute damage to players. This also helped me when I started scripting enemy abilities for scripted events in Overlands.