Ryan T. Miller

Thoughts on the Project:

Being my first time on a team of such a size, I felt a lot like I was in a new world entirely. In this new world, I was trying to find my place. Happily, I met a team of incredibly talented and hilarious individuals on the enemy combat team, and they took me under their combat wings.

After a couple weeks of drowning myself in the vision of the game and learning the tools, I was set upon the task of developing a system that would permit open world combat to function procedurally. Thus began a two year journey into "The Encounter System". I knew, even then, this was going to be a major undertaking.

I spent a lot of time determining from other designers, how would they want to use this system? What features were not available now? How did they want to interface with those features? I had to understand the needs of the user.

As the system was being created and iterated on, the game's needs changed, as it happens in the industry, and I was tasked to make the system meet the needs of procedural open world combat, and much more controlled, linear experiences. I relished the chance to flex the system to it's limits.

During this time, I was creating systems just for The Encounter System to function. Systems to manage AI, systems to spawn AI, systems to pace the enemy types, systems after systems! I learned how to pace myself and not burn out when designing during this time.

The only way to know if these systems worked though, was to start seeing how they were being used in missions. I started working a lot closer with mission designers, even getting the chance to create a couple of my own. It was a fantastic learning experience that brought a lot of new features online for the system as a whole as I learned first-hand what was missing.

Once the system was up and running well, it was time for me to go to the task of evaluating our combat, and making sure if combat balance iteration was required, it could be easily done, across the whole game, at once. This was where early investment into high-level systems that all shifted together paid off, and we were able to make some major changes to the combat balance with low-effort. We even developed a hybrid system for what I call "curated procedural." to speed up creation of both linear and procedural combats.

At the end of all this, I felt lots of warm and fuzzy emotions about being down in the trenches with the other designers, not just working at high level systems, but being able to directly use those systems with others, and see the dreams of our designers come to life, one story at a time.

As of this writing, the project is not yet shipped, but is close, and I will be revisiting this topic with more post-mortem thoughts afterward.