My Experience

I worked with a small design team to make and balance new content that aligned with the goals of our LiveOps team. During my time on the project I created new tools and processes that not only increased our ability to test characters and items, but also allowed for new variations with increased visibility into each character’s combat output.

Tool design was a combination of Unreal Blueprints and custom Python scripting which I built using some of the pre-existing systems. This allowed for a rapid testing and release which was ideal given our short window before soft-launch and worldwide release.

When not working on tests or improving the existing tools, I created over 40 in-game items called “relics”. Everything from initial design to implementation and testing. Though only 12 were released, it was a fun experience of rapid testing and prototyping that allowed me to delve deeper into how the combat team leveraged blueprints for their combat interactions.

Responsibilities

• Designed and built automated testing tools and scenarios using UE4/5 Blueprints and custom Python scripts

• Worked with combat designers to create new character abilities and battle scenarios, including event battles for post-launch updates

• Performed over 3000 balance test scenarios daily, parsing the data into a easily readable forms and delivering it to the key stakeholders

• Created sanity checks for new characters to find outliers with over and underpowered abilities, providing the teams with rapid analysis and potential pitfalls for characters introduced into the existing meta

• Designed, built and maintained in-game Relics that players could use in combination to deepen their team build craft

Postmortem

I came into this game shortly before release and had to teach myself most of the pieces needed to complete my job. A lot of the systems had already been established but required fresh eyes to learn, review and improve. The entire experience was a rush of catching up and improving where we could without hindering the existing pipeline.

Since it was a work-in-progress when I started, there was less room for optimization. The players chewed through the content which meant more needed to be made, but there wasn’t an easy way to complete this. If given the chance to revisit, I would focus on getting an earlier framework setup for adding and adjusting content, along with additional documentation for the process. This would allow for new and other members of the team to easily experiment with the game and create newer experiences faster.