Off The Grid
Gunzilla Games
June ‘21 - November ‘22
Pre-Production
Gunzilla Games was founded in 2020 by industry veterans, working to create Off The Grid - a cyberpunk-themed third person battle royale, developed in Unreal Engine 5.
What drew me to the project was its ambition to offer new take on the BR genre, the promise of helping shape the project as it began pre-production, as well as the fantastic senior talent on the team I knew I would learn from.
At Gunzilla, I contributed to:
Gamemode & mission design - I worked on many of the gamemode's most challenges features, from narrative-driven missions to adding player interaction to battle royale zone mechanics.
Prototyping and implementation - Taking high-level designs into the engine, working with engineers to deliver features in Unreal Blueprints, such as a mission system, a monorail and battle royale zone functionality.
Processes and communication - As a newly founded studio, Gunzilla's team culture had yet to be defined. I took a proactive role in helping shape design processes and pipelines.
At Gunzilla, I was given a lot of agency and trust to deliver on key features despite my inexperience. I often presented designs to directors directly, took ownership of features I worked on, and looked to lead a young team by example.
Highlights
Mission System
One of Off The Grid's main challenges was to incorporate narrative-driven missions into a Battle Royale setting.
I worked closely with writers, level designers and environment artists to bring this feature to life.
My responsibilities were to:
Act as a bridge between teams to design the gameplay and coordinate the implementation of missions
Improve on the mission system toolset, working with gameplay coders to allow for maximum flexibility
Iterate on a production pipeline to ensure the process would be ready to support a live-service schedule
My task boiled down to balancing the team's ambitions for spectacular, linear missions with the existing constraints of a battle royale match.
The final product ended up cutting many of the planned narrative elements, with the system stripped back to more conventional in-game assignments - see gameplay below:
Design process
As part of a newly formed team working on a new IP, we needed to establish a positive team culture and effective design processes. I took a proactive role in shaping both, despite my acknowledged inexperience.
I contributed to:
Design guidelines: Being in pre-production when I joined the team, Gunzilla had yet to formalize many aspects of its design process. I successfully proposed a set of design principals based on Jason Vandenbergh's Engines of Play, which helped the team set expectations for new features and measure their success.
Meeting etiquette: I assisted the Design Director in the creation and running of regular milestone review, fine-tuning the format and trying to ensure our features were adhering to the game's vision.
Documentation standards: I drove the standardization of design documentation, to ensure it was as usable, visual and production-ready as possible.
Conclusions
I believe I perform best when I'm at the nexus of different development teams, collaborating across disciplines to deliver on the project's vision - that's exactly where I was during my time at Gunzilla. Working on gamemodes is one of the best ways to gain experience quickly in design, through a rigorous process of finding the fun through iteration.
I was able to hone my skills in design, presentation, prototyping and production, notably thanks to the great mentorship I got while I was there. Working at Gunzilla was constantly challenging and stimulating, and was a profound learning experience for me.
