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Creatures

Revamped Starter Experience

Worked on Lost Knight Fencer, Polearm and Medea.

Medea was a quest boss largely based on an existing caster type.

  • Spawns in minions (Swarmancers) at health 75%, 50% and 25% health tiers.

  • Starts with crystal that can be used to stun nearby enemies.

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With Medea, I wanted to delve into the narrative for some of the creature's abilities, she uses crystals to exert her influence on the Windsward region, this includes her Swarmancer minions, the player interacting the crystal momentarily disrupts her influence over them and stuns them, allowing the player to either attack her, or the minions.

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The idea was to give the player a choice in how they engage, Medea will spawn her minions at the different health tiers, so players can either use the crystal to have an easier time of killing the minions, or ignore them and use the crystal stun to isolate Medea.

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AngryEarth

Rise of the Angry Earth

 

Worked on...

  • Medusa

  • Reworked minions for Medusa (Corvid, Boar, Reindeer)

  • Chameleon

  • Armored Dragon

  • Mammoths : Lightning, Ice, Lava

  • A lot of documentation, different ways to make spells

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Medusa

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Had to overcome several technical challenges.

Petrification of minions: Set up status effects to disable the enemies movements, and set up stacking effects to damage health over time. Had to set up collision objects that would block Medusa's gaze attack, and prevent the player from moving through them, but not cause clipping issues with the AI. 

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Material Switching: No default or documented pipeline, and all designers who had worked with this before had left, needed to reverse engineer it based on prior implementations.
 

Minion Attacks: The Corvid, Boar and Reindeer creatures all had versions in regular gameplay that weren't suited towards a mini-boss encounter, with ranged attacks that would have pulled away focus in the wrong ways from Medusa, so I stripped out some of those attacks and changed some attack styles on creatures like the Corvid to be more aggressive and better suited to complement Medusa.

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Armored Dragon

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Worked on the Armored Dragon, which was largely a reskin of an existing creature, but needed some additional attacks and polishing. Key highlight from this creature was approaching the attacks with a more scientific nature, many of the attacks weren't visually distinguishable from the anticipation to the damage state. I worked on re-timing some of the animations to more clearly indicate their state with respect to data on average human reaction times. I'd also made adjustments to damage zones for broader AOE attacks and how quickly players could get away, so the overall attacks felt fun, with close getaways!

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Mammoth Variants

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Implemented three of the four Mammoth common variants, Ice, Lighting and Lava, the designer primarily in charge of the mammoths had already built out the core of the attacks, but each mammoth had a few unique attacks...
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Ice Mammoth would summon a blizzard storm and have an AOE Ice tusk stomp

Lava Mammoth would toss around a volley of lava orbs and left a burning trail in it's wake during a charge attack.

Lightning Mammoth casts lightning strikes at the player.

UNNANOUNCED FPS

Worked directly with narrative to discuss designs for a faction of creatures, we delved into the lore to make sure there was a direct link between how the creatures behaved and who they were, I really care about ensuring the world feels deep and vibrant.

I was responsible for constructing fodder, elite, tank and miniboss creatures within the faction I owned. My design approach was building economically, having creatures within the faction share many base attacks, so I could make the difficult variants more difficult, players are learning tough enemies while fighting the fodder enemies!

I also worked to push the bounds of what we could do, creating systems for staggering enemies when they were interrupted mid-attack, I built other kinds of attacks in a modular fashion so they could be used easily and extended by other designers.

I also pushed to reform different documentation practices, when I first started on the project, there was a significant breakdown in communication between design and art disciplines, clearer tables set up to describe cosmetic and data points of an attack, combat flow behaviors, letting designers express behaviors, narratives, and visuals of the creatures in a short, but comprehensive form, this also enabled other disciplines to anticipate what their asks would be.

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