Wonder Woman

Cancelled

Platforms: PC, Console

Details

Wonder Woman was going to be an open world experience using the nemesis system to inject player driven gameplay into the world of one of the most recognizable super heroes on the planet.

My Role

On Wonder Woman I had a couple of different roles.

I started as a sandbox designer, working with a team to create designs for everything that the player would stumble upon and interact with in the open world of the game. Part of this included non gameplay ambient vignettes, meant to be sets of animations and scenes used to fill the background of spaces and make the world feel alive. I also worked on sandbox gameplay opportunities. These were dynamic gameplay events that could spawn in around the world and give the player opportunities to interact with different characters and systems in the game. Some of which reinforced the core loop of gameplay, some allowed for player driven nemesis moments, and some did both. In all of these categories I was responsible for taking these designs from concept through to in engine implementation working with other teams (animation, engineering, narrative etc.) as needed to make sure my work was supporting the core loops of the game.

I was also responsible for setting up larger combat encounters across the sandbox. This involved designing for enemy type, density, placement, and behavior to make sure that anywhere the player could encounter combat felt like a curated experience where the enemies felt strategic and capable and not like a random group of enemies just dropped in clumps around the map.

Along side my work as a sandbox designer, I also took on the role of guiding the development of the nemesis system for this project. Figuring out how to adapt the nemesis system to support the values and gameplay goals of Wonder Woman was a unique challenge, but one we were able to tackle and deliver on in the time we had before the game was shuttered.

The nemesis system is a a complex multifaceted system that requires input and development from every team on a project. It was my job to float in the middle of all of those teams to act as the nemesis vision holder, facilitate communication, and make sure that every teams specific piece of the nemesis system connected correctly to the core vision of the player experience we needed to deliver. I worked with everyone to figure out what characters we would create that the system would take advantage up, what stories we did and did not want to tell with those characters, what kind of content we wanted to design and implement to tell it (both golden path and dynamic in the sandbox), what decisions and/or changes needed to be made to the world to support it, and what systems and tools we needed to bring it all together in the players hands.

It was an amazing opportunity to bring an entire studio together behind a shared goal of reviving a beloved system and expanding it to make something truly new.