Project: HERO

Overview

• Date: Summer 2023

• Duration: 4 Months

• Team Size: 60

• Role: Meta Progression Designer

• Genre: Single-Player Hero Shooter

• Platform: PC

Responsibilities

• Create a meta progression system that will increase the replayability of the game and encourage the player to use the game’s many heroes.

• Adapt systems in response to new developments from other teams and feedback from project leads.

Postmortem

Implementing a meta progression system into an existing game was a fun challenge, as it required implementing a wide-spanning system in a way that didn’t interrupt the current experience of the game and meshed with the existing systems. The hero ranking mechanic, a score that increases as the player beats levels and uses new heroes, was my first attempt at the system, intended to give players sense of continuous growth even while replaying the same level multiple times, but even after new levels were added and the hero ranking could be used to gate these levels for a more tangible sense of progress, the system’s ability to motivate the player still felt lacking. To remedy this, we added the challenges mechanic, which gave the player specific goals of varying difficulty to strive for, giving them more reason to replay through the same levels. Crucially, these challenges frequently require the player to complete the level or do an additional task as a particular hero, further encouraging the player to experience and master all of the game’s heroes rather than taking an initial liking to one hero and neglecting the others for the rest of the game.

This was my first time working in such a large team, which provided eve more new and interesting challenges. Due to the scale of the project, the team was split up into many “sub-teams” that all worked on singular mechanics, such as a new hero or level. Despite efforts from the project’s producer, these sub-teams ended up very isolated from each other, which led to less cross-team communication than we needed. In order to account for these communication issues, our systems were designed to be very modular and well-documented, allowing for us to seamlessly integrate our systems into existing work even as major updates were made to them, and for people on other teams to implement their work into our systems without directly consulting us.