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I worked both as a standard technical designer, and as a technical creature designer on this project. When I was switched off of New World and onto this project, I had to integrate quickly into pre-established tools without a significant amount of support. I helped stand up crowd systems, created new hooks for mission event systems, worked with NPC spawner systems, and more, all as my onboarding.

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Creature Design: From there I moved onto creature design. The goal was to remix existing NPCs from that IP so they wouldn't feel boring, and additionally to create new creatures that tonally fit within the IP. I was tasked with creating one of the new factions. To do this, I elected to follow a formula similar to the Valkyries in God of War. I immensely appreciate how they're able to ramp up the difficulty of the combat encounters by teaching the player to fight a weaker Valkyrie first, as a player you learn the moves and behaviors, and then learn to counter them before the next, more challenging encounter.

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Faction Building: I took this and extrapolated it faction wide. Fodder enemies would use a simple swipe attack, and a simply heavy punch attack, minibosses would use similar attacks as well, so players can easily recognize and understand the counter to these attacks. I used this as a way to economically design my creatures, and still give them a wide array of attacks. To ensure creatures did feel like they weren't just carbon copies on a sliding scale, the heavy fodder and other mid-tier enemies were also granted some unique attacks of their own. Larger swipes, stomps, grenades, etc. Expanding variety was also fairly easy to do from a data set, some variants were given personal shields but lower health, outfitted with sniper rifles and told to stay near the outskirts of the encounter, whereas others, with much the same behavior trees, were simply given shorter range weapons, beefier healthbars, and tuned to be more aggressive.

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Miniboss: I also love to tell a good story. I think it's important to recognize that bossfights, with the increased healthbars and time spent fighting an individual enemy, are a fantastic point for you to slow down, and tell a story. This doesn't need to be with words, I think often some of the best storytelling is often done without words, and instead told in action. I was given control of a miniboss encounter, full reign to design it however I wanted. I had previously worked with the narrative team, pitched some changes to how a certain mechanic narratively functioned, essentially the concept being that the amount of an exposure to a particular substance, and at what point during an individual's lifecycle, would change how the individual would react, how much of their humanity would they retain? The miniboss you fought engaged with the substance in a healthy dose, a little later in their life, allowing them to retain more of their humanity, staying more disciplined, intelligent and controlled. So I wanted combat to reflect that.

     The encounter had three phases, starting from engaging with an enemy that doesn't want to fight, and is trying to scare you off, and ending with a creature backed into a corner, understanding that this is an "Only one of us is walking away" type situation.

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1. The encounter begins with the enemy using powerful attacks, but quickly retreating, they would pelt you with easily enough avoidable, yet quite damaging AoE attacks, communicating "You'd be dead right now if I willed it" to the player.

2. The enemy transforms into a beast, the AoE attacks are no longer in their arsenal as they can't physically manifest those attacks anymore. The combat is now physically based, this is meant to catch the player off guard, but the creature is still not entirely trying to kill the player, they switch to skirmish attacks, staying at the outskirts of the encounter before charging in and dealing attacks that have high knockback, additionally the one ranged attack they have is a boomerang style attack that also deals minimal damage but high knockback. This creates a safe environment for the player to feel the disruption, but the lower damage dealt means they're safe to learn the new rules of the encounter.

3. The boomerang attack breaks into a metal shard, which now deals high damage to the player, and pulls the player in to the enemy, all of the high knockback attacks are reversed into high damage attacks, and the movement pattern is shifted from skirmish, to aggressive charges.

Additionally, as each phase progresses, the enemy loses shards of it's armor, cracks appear, blood stains drench their clothes, the changes in their behavior should be reflected as much in their behavior as in their visuals.

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And, attacks I created for this encounter were made modular and simple, so other designers were able to easily use them without having to go through any of the math or programming I did.

Documentation: I worked with the lead designer to revamp our documentation practices. I went to each department that was working with the creature design team, and worked to understand any frustrations they had. VFX in particular had been complaining about a lack of clarity for the creature attacks. I created a template for our creature documentation that had overviews for the creature, explaining their role in the game, overall feel, and narrative intent. Followed by tables explaining the attack, description, shape, rough distance estimates, and draw-overs for what the VFX ought to look like. This significantly improved the clarity of design, translating more of what was assumed to be understood by others, into clear verbiage of design intent.

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Iterations to the Design Formula: Design is at it's best when it finds ways to encourage the player to solve different problems. For combat in particular, variety and new problems to solve is key to keeping things fresh. Most shooters suffer from the problem of "Center screen on target and fire till dead", I wanted to add a simple coat of paint to switch things up on the player. One of the "veteran" enemy types would spawn in a floating object, this would follow them around and give different buffs to their nearby allies. Only one was allowed to be active on the field at a time, and each veteran could themselves only spawn one, but if there were multiple veteran enemies, one could summon their own floating friend once the prior one was destroyed. This was a simple change that just encouraged players to look up more often. This was also clearly communicated to the player, they would see ribbons tethered from the object to each affected enemy, and the object itself would rise into the sky, only a few meters above the summoner.

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Parry This! : For further additions to the combat formula, I prototyped a simple parry system. Different colored rings would pop up near an enemy attack to indicate parry state.

1. Default parry, long window, enemy would get locked into a light stagger for a brief duration

2. Perfect parry, short window, enemy takes heavy damage and is locked into a larger stun window

3. Unparryable, player can no longer parry the attack, enemy still takes damage, but the player takes extra damage now.

I also worked to make this system easily implementable by other designers, it worked off of modified gameplay abilities, and only required adding the component, and making the abilities and animations for the different stagger states.