Alan Wake 2
Project Details-
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Third-person survival horror game
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Roles:
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Gameplay/A.I Designer
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Made in Remedy Entertainment's proprietary engine, Northlight
Responsibilities
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Worked with one other AI designer to create all the games enemies and boss fights, and was the only A.I designer on the games two DLCs.
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Designed and scripted enemies and boss fights from the concept/prototype stage to the final shipped product.
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Implemented enemy designs using behavior trees, state machines and LUA scripting.
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Rapidly prototyped enemy concepts, behaviors and abilities.
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Worked closely with other crafts to assist with the implementations of animations, audio, art and VFX for enemies.
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Worked closely with level designers to implement enemies into level flows and assisted with iteration of combat encounters to ensure the encounter spaces work well with the enemy behavior.
Work examples:
This video showcases one of the enemy types I designed, the Binder.
The main feature of this enemy is its ability to submerge itself in the supernatural "water" that surrounds it. She can then move around under the water a surprise the player with sudden grapples.
The intent was to create an enemy that is threatening and scary in a supernatural way. Due to her slow speed and melee attacks that deal less damage than other enemies, she isn't that threatening in a head-on fight. She instead uses her ranged ability to surpress the player and then relies on being able to surprise the player by using her underwater movement.
This video showcases one of the boss fights I created. This is the first boss in the game and features and large, aggressive enemy called Nightingale. The boss utilizes large, swinging melee attacks, and darkness empowered abilities. It switches between two phases, one where the player must directly fight Nightingale and another where they are forced into a narrower space in which Nightingale stalks the player and can surprise them by smashing through walls, jumping down from ledges or appearing from around corners.
This fight was challenging during development as it is the first boss players encounter during the game, and occurs after only two fights with regular enemies. Because of this the boss had to go through a lot of balancing iteration to ensure it was an intense moment without becoming an early roadblock for new players. To achieve this we tried to make his attacks slow and well telegraphed and also give him large stagger reactions to damage that created moments for the player to deal follow-up damage.
On release many new players still struggled with this encounter, as they were still getting used to the mechanics and some players missed an early game weapon that is very effective in the fight. But from looking at player feedback most players seemed to easily pass the fight after learning his attack patterns and dodge timings. And I was able to further address balancing issues through post-launch patches.
This video showcases another one of the enemy types I designed, the Thrower.
This is an enemy type that was carried over from the original Alan Wake, they're a ranged enemy that pummels the player with thrown weapons from afar. During the design process I wanted to emphasise the supernatural elements of our enemies more than the original game. As such I designed the Thrower to have several new abilities such as splitting into two enemies when hit with the flashlight.
They are also capable of running at supernatural speeds to relocate to new throwing positions. During development this ability recieved a lot of iteration. We wanted the Thrower to be able to take the player by surprise by moving quickly and attacking from different directions, but we didn't want the player to feel like they're unable to keep track of it or it attacks too much from off-screen. We implemented many things to help with this such as:
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VFX trails while the enemy runs to help the player track their movement
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Directional audio both indicating when the enemy is about to attack and also playing while the projectile flies through the air
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Reduced attack frequency when the enemy is off-screen
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A "forced miss" system that guarantees the first projectile thrown when the enemy is off-screen will miss the player, thus warning the player an enemy is behind them and reducing the chances of them taking damage from off-screen