Zero Parades is an espionage RPG, where you play as a brilliant but tormented operant on one final desperate assignment. As the Principal Gameplay Designer on this project, I have been working closely with the rest of the team to coordinate the development of the core game systems, namely the Skills, the Pressures (which simulate the physical and psychological toll of being an operant) and the dice rolls.
More to come when Zero Parades launches!
For Criterion’s return to the racing genre, I was given the opportunity to lead the design for one of the three project ‘Verticals’, responsible for the multiplayer, progression, customisation and UX design of the game. Given Need for Speed’s focus on self-expression and history of online experiences, this was a crucial role with many competing priorities. I worked hard alongside our Design Director, the two other Vertical Lead Designers and our producers to ensure that the team was coordinated and inspired to do their best work.
My Vertical was responsible for the design and implementation of the multiplayer half of NFS Unbound: “Lakeshore Online”, which complements the single player adventure. During the early development of this feature set, we spent a lot of time researching previous successful implementations of online racing experiences and immersing ourselves in the culture and fantasy of street racing. We set our vision upon creating cooperative, unruly forms of play that deliver on the fantasy of connecting with a community of other street racers and defying the rules of lawful society.
NFS is well known for its incredibly deep vehicle customisation. For Unbound, we wanted to push the envelope of creativity even further. Our Creative Director established a unique visual style for the game, combining hyperrealism with graffiti and comic book art.
This gave us new opportunities to reward the player with beautiful customisation options, such as the dynamic and exhilarating Driving Effects that can be seen when you drift or stunt. We also successfully broadened the character customisation and introduced player-designed banners to the game for online players to show off their accomplishments.
Unfortunately, due to budget and time constraints, much of what was designed for the Lakeshore Online experience had to be cut at launch. However, due to the diligence of the team and a commitment to post-launch content, the features returned as they had been designed in subsequent updates.
Two of these features that I led the development on and was especially glad to see return were the cooperative Link-Up events that called players across the server to work on stunt events together while avoiding the cops, and the emote wheel, which finally allowed players to coordinate and express themselves in the online space.
After the release of Link-Ups and the emote wheel in Volume 3, the community were increasingly invested in the online experience. As with any live service game, they had many criticisms and calls for improvement, but it was incredibly rewarding to see the hard work and vision that the team and I had strived for finally in the hands of players and to witness them eagerly enjoying the greater focus on cooperative driving experiences.
After working as a designer on an unreleased shooter with Criterion for a year, the project was unfortunately cancelled. However, I was able to join DICE again to support them on their next Battlefield project: the near-future all-out warfare sandbox FPS ‘Battlefield 2042’. As a huge fan of hero shooters, I was very excited to work directly on the game’s Specialists.
I worked alongside other designers from DICE on the core abilities of the Specialists in Battlefield 2042. Each Specialist has a unique active and passive ability that makes their gameplay experience unique.
I joined the project close to the launch, taking responsibility for many of the abilities that sense enemies through walls or spawn new deployables, such as Rao’s ability to expose multiple enemies through walls using his Cyber Warfare Suite and Angel’s ability to call in a Loadout Crate to resupply teammates.
Once the Specialist abilities were feature-complete and in testing, I moved over to support the Hazard Zone team, working specifically on the Tactical Upgrades system. As Hazard Zone was intended to be an Extraction Shooter-style game mode for the latest Battlefield, the Tactical Upgrades acted as loot that could be purchased between rounds to augment a player’s character and increase their chances of survival. I helped to implement the Upgrades in Frostbite, iterating on them as needed and assessing their impact on the balance of the Hazard Zone game mode.
For most of this project, I worked on the Firestorm lobby. This is a unique feature of the Firestorm mode that other Battlefield modes don’t have. After a squad has gone through the matchmaking flow, they arrive in a lobby space where they can choose their class and then test out their weapons and hang out with other players while waiting for the server to be full.
As this is the first experience that a new player will have of Firestorm, I needed to ensure that it was flawless. My work covered the design and engineering of the flow from the moment the player entered the server, all the way until their character jumps out of the plane above the Firestorm map. I put an extensive amount of time and effort into testing this flow to ensure that there were no bugs.
Another feature that I got the opportunity to contribute to is the armour system in Firestorm. This system emerged quite late in production, so it was necessary to jump into the design and implementation as quickly as possible. I worked with designers to establish how the armour vests and plates would function in the mode. Each player starts with a small armour vest which can contain a single armour plate. Each armour plate adds additional health to a soldier. Finding larger vests allows players to equip more plates (up to a total of 3 plates, which equates to 150 more health).
Star Wars Battlefront II featured the Starfighter Assault mode, seeing 24 players pilot one of the iconic fighter ships, such as X-Wings or TIE fighters. Once they earned enough points, they could upgrade to a hero ship such as Darth Maul’s Scimitar. During a round, one side launches wave after wave of fighters against giant capital ships, while the other attempts to hold out and defend them. The mode was very well received, with critics praising it for the extremely tight controls and unique interactive maps.
During this project, I worked with a small team that was focused on delivering the gameplay components of the many starfighters. My role was to help design and implement all of the starfighter abilities in the game. You can see a few of these abilities in the trailer above, such as the invisibility cloak that is deployed by Maul’s Scimitar.
Below you can see some of the loadouts for the starfighters in the game. Each starfighter has 3 abilities. Generally, the left-hand ability is defensive, the right-hand ability is offensive, and the middle ability is something unique to that fighter and more powerful.
Before entering production on the abilities, I worked to establish the different types that we would have in the game and how we would implement them. Each starfighter has 3 abilities, all of which have cooldowns. Some trigger and then last for a long duration, others fire off a one-shot effect. Many abilities can interact with each other or overlap in unique ways to provide the player with powerful combos.
During production, I engineered each ability in Frostbite and collaborated with VFX artists, audio designers, engineers and gameplay designers to ensure that they feel incredible and meet the quality expected of Star Wars.
I had the incredible opportunity of working on the Rogue One: X-Wing VR mission, which was the first VR game to be made by EA. We developed the experience in Frostbite, building on DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront title, after extensive prototyping in Unity.
The mission takes you through an incredibly immersive story of a rookie X-Wing pilot who is thrown into the action a little faster than they expected. At the time of release, it was one of the highest-quality VR experiences available and received overwhelming praise from all who got to play it.
Before the project, a small group of Criterion devs and I experimented frequently with Unity VR during quarterly hackathons. The skills we developed during those hackathons were part of EA’s motivation to give the VR project to Criterion. The expertise I gained directly translated into the early prototypes of the mission. During the production phase, I collaborated with artists and designers to author several unique narrative moments that occur during the story and designed and developed the enemy AI logic, iterating to achieve the desired pacing and emotional impact.
Creating a VR game always presents unique challenges. From very early on in development, we identified various ways in which VR can produce motion sickness and then designed the final experience to prevent these effects as best as possible. In general, we tried to avoid any sudden change in speed or direction, and also prevent the ship from rolling, as these techniques all proved to increase the comfort for the player.
Interacting with the world in VR provides a lot more immersion than in standard games. Because of this, we took the opportunity to let the player press any button within the X-Wing cockpit, and made sure that all of them do something! Small details like this greatly added to the realism of the mission and won over the hearts of many fans.
