Firefall
Description: Firefall is a dynamic, open-world MMO shooter with limitless exploration of a vast future Earth, rewarding skilled players as they progress through a deep story. Fighting for a world forever changed by the Melding, Firefall players customize their battleframes and weaponry, taking the fight to the Chosen to reclaim Earth. With team-based and on-demand quests, Firefall is the first MMO to feature truly dynamic events that appear throughout the game world, offering players new experiences every time they play. Venture in the open world, join a team in the open world PvP zone, face off against a myriad of enemies in multiple dungeons and raids, or spend your day customizing your look to fit your personality – the possibilities in Firefall are enormous!
Role: Associate Content Designer / Associate Technical Designer / Technical Designer. As a scripter, I helped various teams complete major objectives by creating modular scripts that runs open world encounters, the main quest system (ARES Jobs), seasonal events, instanced group encounters (Operations), and open world PvP.
Road Ambush
My first assignment was creating open world dynamic encounters to populate the first three leveling zones Coral Forest, Sertaoand Diamondhead, hence dubbed “Wandering Encounters”, as they are pieces of content that are created to be consumed by wandering around the map.
ARES Job System & Editor
With the success of the Wandering Encounters, I was put on a team tasked to populate the world’s town hubs with hundreds of quests in 6 months. As the main scripter on the team, I created the base LUA libraries that power the dynamic generation of the quests, as well as location and player management throughout their journey. I also created the reward mechanism and two of the gameplay modes. Additionally, I was one of the key members in creating the in-house tool that allowed the team to generate a big volume in such a small time constraint.
Chosen Invasion (Kill the Devs Event)
Once the initial batch of quests were completed, the ARES Job team took a break and split up into different parts of the game. As a passion project and an effort to spur concurrency upon our launch window, a few of the designers banded together to create the Chosen Invasion event. In what is probably my favorite contribution to the game, this event saw the developers signing in with a special item that transformed them into an "NPC" boss. Initially, we did not tell players about what was going on, allowing for word of mouth rumors of the new named enemies. As a boss, we could spawn encounters, actual NPC minions, and wielded other amazing powers. Players who participated reaped great rewards from our generated content, providing for a fun and profitable experience for those who participated. Playing against our community was one of the most fun things I did while working on this game. With this event, we hit our peak lifetime concurrency -- a remarkable achievement for a 1-2 week project. We eventually did this event 2 more times, adding more skills and power-ups for the developers.
Night of the Melding (Halloween Event)
Following the wake of the Chosen Invasion event, the next team I was assigned to was the Live Events team – the people responsible for Firefall’s seasonal events like Christmas, Halloween and New Years. In a two month development period and using pre-existing assets, I created the Night of the Melding (Halloween) in-game event which consisted of two open world encounters, decorating the major towns and of course, a myriad of cool rewards like a pet Headless Horseman!
Operation Miru (Dungeon)
While finalizing the Night of the Melding event, I began work on the first two rooms of Operation Miru, Firefall’s first divergent path instanced encounter. I only worked on the first two rooms, while another scripter finished the rest of the dungeon. However, the final room was my design from a previously unreleased encounter re-purposed for the operation. Something worth mentioning is that the LUA libraries created for the ARES Job system were utilized for this operation – proving their modularity!
Broken Peninsula – Open World PvP
Once the Night of the Melding event had been finalized and through QA, I was put on the Open World PvP team, under the leadership of Scott Youngblood (creator of Tribes). Under his vision, I implemented the majority of features in Broken Peninsula, including the PvP Job system, player bounty system, upgradable bases, resource collection/stealing, optional base components such as player driven vehicles, three turret types, remote spawn points, and vehicle traps.
Accord Skydock
After I had concluded creating all the features that Scott Youngblood had requested, I was promptly paired with another designer to finish a large scale world event. This was a big challenge since we had inherited this encounter from a designer who had left the studio. The majority of the event was completed, but I was tasked with fixing some critical issues, along with creating the UI elements for all the objectives, making sure they appeared and triggered properly between all three phases of the event.
ARES Job System & Editor, Redux
With the Chinese release approaching, I was tasked with modifying and adding more elements to the ARES Job system and editor. Using the knowledge of what worked and what didn’t, I cleaned up and streamlined the system even further, adding more quest game types including “glider challenge” (which was integrated into the system after the popularity of the seasonal event made by Jon Brietner). Being able to add any type of content into the questing system proved the robust nature of what I had created. Additionally, I improved stability of the system across the board and added the ability to create quest givers that could time-gate the jobs per player, per server.
Team Deathmatch - Arena PVP
After the redux of the quest system, I was promptly returned to the PVP team under the lead of Kevin Lee, the former Carbine Studios and ‘Wildstar’ PVP lead. Working with him, I created the scripts for a variety of game modes and a base that helped with player-team management, stat tracking and back-filling. The first game mode that I was tasked with was recreating team deathmatch on 3 different maps.
Jetball – Arena PVP
Once I completed team deathmatch, I was tasked with updating Firefall’s premier arena PVP game mode: Jetball. The old script that was used nearly 3 years prior did not function at all. Many changes to the game’s core APIs made it unusable. I had to recreate the entire script from scratch and added of the ideas presented by the team, such as different scoring types, long range shots, passing/blocking, and a rotating goal. Working with level designers and world builders over the course of several weeks, we created the game mode’s map (with designs for a second).
Hunter vs Ghosts – Casual Arena PVP
Because these two game modes were very competitive, combined with the fact that we were gearing to release in China, where more casual shooter games like Crossfire are very popular, I was tasked with creating a competitive yet “casual” experience for the masses of players from China. This amounted to the “Hunters vs Ghosts” game mode. This was an adaptation of Crossfire’s “mutant” game mode, but with a distinct Firefall flavor.
We added many abilities and actual ghost mechanics. The basic design is as follows: there are 12 players on the map, 1 gets chosen to become the “hunter” (a “Chosen”, aka Firefall’s bad guys) and must hunt down the remaining 11 players. These other players are “ghosts” and will become completely invisible if they stand still. If they move, they are translucent, but not invisible. The original hunter can convert these “ghosts” to “hunters” by finding and eliminating them. True to Firefall’s nature, there are upgrades that “ghosts” can grab from the field, including “Thunderdome” where they can trap a “hunter” for a small period of time, a jetpack to fly, “Decoy” where it creates a fake version of the “ghost” that runs around, and many others. The “hunters” also have abilities like “Ground Slam”, or the more important one called “Search” that will make the “hunter” immobile, but will reveal “ghosts” within the area. Additionally, “hunters” have a passive trait that hints at the direction of a nearby “ghost” by giving them a fullscreen FX.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t been released yet (but has been talked about) so I cannot show a video.