DEMO & PITCH

During our initial demo & pitch phase, I was the sole designer. Collaborating closely with the creative director and level artist, we developed an open-world multiplayer experience featuring a singular "dungeon" area. While the creative director laid out the world design, I was responsible for all level and set design decisions, as well as the implementation of interactive elements, damage tuning, and unique traversal features.

We ended up pitching our demo to around 25+ publishers (all of the major ones and more). During this time, I assumed the role of Stage Director. My responsibility was to 1) act as the server for our game 2) act as a Game Master by directing participating devs to create an authored experience for each publishing group and 3) participate in pitch and/or due diligence meetings that fell outside of demos. Ultimately, we reached the contract negotiation phase with 3 publishers.

INTERNAL PROJECT DEVELOPMENT

In the lead-up to our collaboration with Amazon Games Studio, my focus shifted towards creating a budget and staffing plan, expanding the design team, refining milestone definitions, and iterating on our schedule. Additionally, I established our internal design wiki in Notion, promoted production tools in Miro, participated in strategic leadership meetings, facilitated design tactical weeklies, and ran daily standups.

As the team grew from 1 designer and 15 developers to 8 designers and over 40 developers, I transitioned to a more principal role. Recognizing areas that required attention, I spearheaded teams for our very special vehicle, the HUB world, progression, and World Design. Serving as the strike team leader and product owner for World Design, I oversaw the creation of over 100 km^2 of open-world content using UE5’s world partition and in-house Houdini tools.

The ORCA is a vehicle capable of traversing in land, sea, and air.. Our brilliant engineers created physically simulated, network replicated vehicles. And if that wasn’t hard enough, we added ladders on top of everything. Honestly, if you ever need to hire some network wizards, you really need to contact Disruptive Games.

The interior layout design was really challenging. Making the vehicle fun to be in, fun to move around in, and fun to be on top of took many iterations to get right. This developer TikTok video pulls together a museum of versions I had gone through to explore what would work and not work in an unprecedented space. The space extraction shooter game Wildgate solves all of the design issues by 1) making their ships very large and 2) moving in free floating space.

You can learn more about this game on the Wreck Runners Steam Page.