I joined this project as it was already underway, and my immediate feedback was that the game relied too heavily on traditional 2D input paradigms for the majority of our interactions. We needed to make every effort to prioritize tracked inputs, simulating the physicality of our 3D world. The team agreed with this in theory, but weren’t convinced of the value until I built prototypes using our pre-existing assets and Unreal’s Blueprint scripting. Actually getting to use the new gesture-based input system made it clear how just how valuable these changes were. These prototypes led to a ground-up overhaul of nearly all in-game interactions.

From the start, State of Decay 2 had a lofty goal: transition the series from a linear, tightly-scripted narrative to a dynamic, responsive, open-ended mission system. I collaborated with an engineer to establish the system that would accomplish this, and build the tools we would need to actually create the content. We used a casting system, looking for best-fit in characters, locations, items, and so on. This system prioritized status changes that had been caused by player activity (e.g. if we want you to deal with a hostile human, we prioritize a human that is hostile as a result of your previous interactions over a character spawned that way), which gave players a strong sense of ownership and influence over the narrative. Casting criteria, objective logic, mission branching and more were all integrated into a single tool. The resulting toolset was then used by the team to create hundreds of hours of dynamic content. State of Decay 2 went on to be the best-selling game of May 2018. 

For the first months of test market release, all mission and combat content in Battle Nations was still being built in raw .JSON files. Everything was being entered by hand, and introducing a small syntax error could result in issues that took hours to track down. I functioned as product owner with our engineering team in the creation of a game data editor. The rollout occurred in multiple stages, but each step increased productivity and dramatically reduced errors, paying off in decreased QA and iteration time. We were able to deliver significant content updates every two weeks, up from every six weeks, which helped drive Battle Nations to earn more than a million dollars per month for more than two years.