After unexpected attrition on the design team, I was quickly offered a chance to lead the Player Abilities team towards a critical milestone. This lightweight group made excellent progress in these two months. Our main focus was to crystalize Victoria’s abilities to better match her to the Tank archetype by
Merging two existing prototypes into the Lion’s Roar Overcharge ability
Designing and coding core aspects of dashing in the Traversal ability, Vanguard
Merging two existing prototypes into the Lion’s Roar Overcharge ability
Shifting directions for the next content lock
September ’21 Deliverables for Maggie, Rico, and Victoria
In July, our team is now tasked to final nine abilities, towards the immediate goal of shipping our three existing player characters.
However, three of those characters’ existing abilities seemed unlikely to succeed. Either not expected to reach quality targets or don’t fit into future visions for MythForce gameplay. We held a one week Strike Team to remedy this issue. Our team’s newest hire, a Combat Design specialist, created the high level plan and set clear paths towards our goals.
With two additional engineers involved, we accomplished a quick turnaround. Our team also brought these and the nine other abilities to shippable state with respect to gameplay and UI.
A novel Deadly Thrust to replace Rico’s Combat Ability Riposte (as seen above)
The active counter ability was failing to be used effectively, due to poor enemy telegraphing
The new active forward jump attack used similar logic to provide conditional invulnerability
Converting Maggie’s Barrier into an Overcharge ability
New and improved version buffs the entire team while slowing enemies
Replacing Maggie’s powerful Rewind with the Utility Ability Teleport
Too many edge cases introduced by moving her back in time to heal and get out of danger
New Blink-like ability took reference from Dishonored gameplay
We iterated on Player Abilities, adjusted scope, and completed 30+ variants in 8 months. I personally handled all incidental requests and implementations for their SFX, VFX, functional tests, and the player-facing loadout menus required to make these variants playable.
During functional changes to these abilities, I guided implementation through daily conversations with our junior programmer. Our pod would meet regularly in an optional drop-in voice chat during the afternoon. There I assisted with high level guidance and we worked out the details for each of the ability animations and variants. Additionally, I provided mentorship and networking support for the programmer on his career journey to become a Technical Game Designer on Apex Legends.
