Unannounced First Person Shooter

Development Details

  • Base Game Developer: Lost Boys Interactive

  • Engine: Unreal Engine 4 (Custom Build of Version 4.20)

  • Genre: “Looter Shooter” (First Person Shooter)

  • Platform: PC, Steam, Epic Games Store, XBox Series X|S, Playstation 5

  • Involvement Time: 1 year

My Roles

Technical Designer (official role)
(Interactive Objects)

I was one of three designers that worked on Interactive Objects (or IO’s for short), which was essentially our fancy way of saying any kind of scripting that didn’t involve being on a character actor. As a result, I handled most of the scripting related to how the player interacts with the world and a good portion of the level specific scripting needs for over a third of the levels in our game.

I was the IO designer that was on the project the longest. As a result, not only was I the sole IO designer during and partway past our proof of concept phase, but I also trained our other two IO designers on how to use the IO systems. During our proof of concept phase, I prototyped the systems that were eventually used for part of our level design in the main game past our proof of concept.

On this project, whenever work slowed down at various points of time during development, I took the initiative and designed tools for our team that were intended to make life easier, such as a tool to merge various splines and a volume that allows one to select multiple objects within a space with a single click (after you’ve fed it parameters).

 

Associate Writer (unofficial role)

I worked in my spare time towards my own professional development towards the sphere of design that I want to ultimately worked in while on this project, which is narrative design and game writing. This started our with me seeking out a mentorship with the lead writer on our project. What started out with the idea of “Hey, I’d like to work towards this field within design, is there any advice you have towards that?” and eventually led to the statement by my mentor of “Y’know what, how about this: let’s take you through the process of creating and owning some sidequests in the game from pitch to implementation.” So, under the guidance of my mentor, I put together pitches for five different sidequests for our game, narrowed down to three strong pitches that I could write towards, researched the gameplay elements that would be central to my quests, wrote two of the scripts, and even worked with another writer/narrative designer to create a spinoff questline based off of one of my scripts. While I don’t have access anymore to the spinoff scripts or my least-polished script, I do have a version of a script that was approved by my mentor to be put in the game that has been edited to not break my NDA for the project. That script can be found by clicking here.