Engine: Unreal 
Players: 1-6 (Online)
Genre: Shooter, Multiplayer, Co-operative
Development Team: 12 people (me included)

​Game Summary: Players play online with up to 5 other teammates as they defend a base against waves of attacking swamp monsters. Killing monsters can drop crystals, which can then be spent on turret upgrades, increase class abilities, or deposited into the base.
Developer Role Summary:
  • Designed and created spreadsheets/documentation for playable classes.
  • Created documentation and balanced gameplay values of enemies and characters.
  • Directed QA testing sessions by bringing playable builds to QA, observing play sessions, writing up surveys for testers to fill out, reading and compiling QA test results.
  • Provided blockouts for level design ideas.

Initial Concepts

Get Personal: When I joined Containment Corps partway through development, the team was looking for a way to add advancement and a way to personalize the characters in the game. I created a presentation that detailed 6 class ideas. Due to time constraints for the project, I specifically labeled to focus on 4 of the 6 planned classes. The 4 classes I picked were classes I thought were vital to implementation because they each would have a vastly different play style from each other, in comparison to the other 2 left behind.

The Wonderful Life of Balancing

Stat Editing: Most of the balancing changes I made to my spreadsheets over time were all from compiled results from QA testing. People would say they weren't using some abilities because they weren't fun, the machine gun felt too chaotic, or some abilities were really weak. I made changes to all of them and would constantly follow up in the QA sessions the next week to see what people said. I also found out that color-coding stuff in spreadsheets made it easier to keep track of stuff for me and other people reading. It also looks nice. I am in a constant need of feedback with whatever I adjust or touch on a project to make sure it feels good, not just to me but to everyone else too.

Level Design

First Concept: My first level design suffered from pacing issues, and I didn't think there was enough variety in the base setup to keep the player entertained as they moved around.

Second Concept: I scrapped the previous idea and started again with another base design that I came up with after researching base designs in other games. The team all gave positive feedback on the first pass of this design.

What I Learned: There's nothing wrong with building off of other designs for levels. I found a design for a base in Star Wars: The Old Republic and realized the base worked because it felt like a lived-in place. My first concept was just an idea I had building off of nothing and had no flow to it. The second concept fared so much better because I was designing it with the mindset of how people would use it in the world.