Outriders
On Outriders I was working in the level design team colaborating closely with the narrative department. I was part of a strike team responsible for side quests, pitching ideas for them and creating first in game drafts. I was credited as a Narrative Designer.
When I left PCF my work was finished to an alpha state. Everything was playable after environment art pass and working as intended. Other designers took my work to completion doing an incredible amount of work to actually finish it for the final product.
Quest implementation and scripting
Combat arena blockouts
Combat encounters design and scripting
Collaboration with the tools team on quest system design and implementation
Quest mechanics prototyping
Dialogue structure and logic based on the story script
Collaboration with cinematic department on cutscenes and dialogues implementation
Level blockouts for cutscenes
Some dialogue drafts
Helping QA department on milestone testing
And much more!
My other resposibilities included:
I also contributed to refining the main story flow, enhancing the pacing and overall player experience. Particularly in the first part of the game.
During my time on Outriders, together with my collegue, we prototype the system of area objectives that was later developed into by the team into a full feature and implemented in the entire game. The goal was to add additional challenges at the combat arenas to fix the pacing problems we encountered and make quests more fleshed out experiences.
At the end of my time in PCF I was assigned to work on Arrival level, the prologue of the game, where I was working on game tutorialization, collaborating closly with the tools team and scripting tutorial’s logic.
One of the first side quests delivered to an alpha state was Payback, where the protagonist faces the psycho who forced him to march into No Man’s Land during the prologue of the game. The Captain holds a fortified position and the player is asked to eliminate him by a request from a wounded soldier they meet on the battlefield. I was responsible for implementing the quest logic from the very start.
Later, I also took over the basic layout from another designer and iterated both the mesh blockout and combat. The idea was to make the player feel like he’s storming a hill, with enemies taking having an advantage. I placed the snipers at the top of the hill, but also surprised the player by releasing closed ranged shotgunners when they were trying to rush forward.
The second arena featured a quite different layout. It was designed to be symmetrical, allowing the player to engage enemies from multiple angles right after the fight begins. This design also emphasized that the enemies, including the Captain, were literally backed into a corner with nowhere left to escape.
Payback
The first thing I was working in engine after joinging Outriders team was a test blockout of a combat arena. After a positive review on the test map it was used as a core location for A Free Market side quest.
The combat arena I designed was primarily created with co-op gameplay in mind, featuring multiple paths for players to engage enemies. The layout consisted of three stages: an entrance where players are initially ambushed by foes, a choke point interior that breaks the pacing and introduces different enemy types, and a final arena where the players take the offensive against action.
One of the challenges during the development of this quest was adapting the arena to fit within an existing level. Initially, it was designed referencing a container town, but the quest where we needed to fit it has a story centered around a lumber camp. A significant amount of effort from the environment art team was required to seamlessly integrate all these elements.
A Free Market
Since this side quest was designed with budget limitations, I had to use different narrative tools compared to other side quests. During the adventure the player hears a radio broadcast calling for help. Interacting with the radio station triggers the quest’s opening scene. In the combat arena, I hid the NPC behind geometry (a latrine), allowing player objectives to be communicated through gameplay voice-overs. This approach made the quest not only budget-friendly — avoiding the need for an additional character model — but also engaging and easy to iterate on.
The early version of Nature’s Call already included numerous mid-quest objectives, which was the basis for the idea later integrated into the arena objective system I mentioned above.
For this quest, I also drafted dialogue scripts to assist our writers, as the quest was heavily gameplay-driven.
Nature’s Call