Midwinter - Behaviour Interactive

PC - Xbox - Playstation

2024 (Cancelled)

Role: Senior Systems Designer

Fully responsible for the game's vehicle systems - one of the most critical gameplay pillars of the project - and ensured that this part of the game was as fun and engaging as it could be. Worked on all aspects of vehicle gameplay from vehicle handling, camera controls, vehicle upgrade systems, vehicle damage and repair. Game was built using the Unreal 5 engine and features were implemented using Blueprints and the Gameplay Ability System.

Features

Automatic counter steering. This along with precisely tuned handling ensured that the vehicle would never spin out or become uncontrollable due to extreme handling inputs or adverse situations.

Skillcheck repair system: When the vehicle gets damaged, players can cooperatively repair the truck using a skillcheck system similar to Dead By Daylight’s generator repair skillcheck. Eventually the repair system was tied into the game’s enemy ambush system, which created dynamic and tense scenarios where players have to defend one or more vulnerable players while being swarmed by enemies.

Vehicle Upgrade system: Leveraged existing game systems to provide a way to upgrade the vehicle mid match. System worked by placing gameplay objects within the vehicle, affecting it’s performance and allowing all players to contribute to the vehicle’s upgrade state.

Contextual Interaction and Highlight System: Worked with engineers to improve the game’s interaction system over several rewrites and revisions. The interaction system could highlight designer specified geometry, handle multiple inputs from multiple players in a networked multiplayer game, and have designer specified functionality. Helped engineering by making concrete use cases that would open up extra engineering time.

Sledgehammer Games - Activision

PC - Xbox - Playstation

2021 (Shipped)

Role: Systems Designer

Responsible for building moment to moment game systems that were part of the core game loop. Contribured to multiple gameplay systems used by the level design team to create gameplay moments within Call Of Duty levels

Features

Dynamic Ammo System: Proposed, Prototyped, and contributed tuning and implementation of major player facing feature novel to Call Of Duty. The system monitors how much ammo the player has and - after a set threshold - dispenses ammo to the player via an item drop after the player kills an enemy. The amount of ammo the player received from that drop was pseudorandom, tuned to have peaks and valleys, so that gameplay would be more unpredictable and force the player to make every shot count. This greatly increased the game’s tension and pacing.

As a part of implementation, we had to create a system that would spawn pickups on corpses in a robust way, since ammo could spawn anywhere and needed to be accessible to the player at all times. We also had to tune every gun to reduce time to kill, since metering the amount of bullets also meant there were less in each level, necessitating guns to do more damage to maintain level pacing.

All implementation done using Call Of Duty’s proprietary GSC scripting language.

Traversal systems Contributed to wall climbing and squeeze through traversal. These systems enabled level designers to easily add wall climbing and squeeze through sections to their levels. Assisted in bugfixes and implementation.

“GAME OF THE YEAR” Todd and Aaron’s Game Awards - Mega 64 - 2021

343 - Microsoft

PC - Xbox

2021 (Shipped)

Role: Systems Designer

Responsible for multiple in game vehicles and weapons crucial to Halo's gameplay sandbox.

Features

Vehicles: Did extensive tuning, prototyping, and scripting for multiple in game vehicles. Tuned vehicles for competetive and fun gameplay over intense iteration and playtesting. Revised controls and movement to facilitate better traversal and manuverability in open world and multiplayer environments. Balanced each vehicle within Halo's extensive sandbox of weapons, abilities, and other vehicles. Tuned and iterated on health states and damage conditions for vehicles.

Prototyped multiple new vehicles, adding new gameplay features and mechanics using extensive LUA scripting. Vehicles worked in both a multiplayer and singleplayer context and were the largest moving vehicles in a Halo title to date.

Weapons: Tuned and iterated on multiple vehicle weapons for fun and competative gameplay. Tuning included damage, fire rate, and range. Each vehicle had it's own weapon system that needed to be tuned and balanced against the rest of the game's sandbox.

Objectives: Prototyped and iterated on designer-placed objects that would serve as objectives in the game's open world levels. Scripted using LUA.