Tommorow Falls

I worked on Tomorrow Falls, a AAA Vehicle Shooter in UE4 for DPS/Wargaming as a Hero Designer. This was the first professional project I worked on in the gaming industry as a designer.

Unfortunately, Tomorrow Falls was a cancelled project. For that reason, I am also unable to show my prototyping and work due to NDA. However, I can provide references if needed.

As a Game Designer on this project, my general responsibilities included:

• Design Heroes in collaboration with other disciplines, such as concept artists, narrative designers, programmers, and artists.

• Take the Heroes from Ideation to being ready for production.

• Write clear and detailed Documentation regarding the Heroes I am responsible for, ensuring they are always up to date with the latest changes.

• Use Blueprints to rapidly prototype and test Hero/Character abilities.

• Balance the Heroes/Characters that I was responsible for in line with a huge roster of other Heroes. This would include aspects such as their abilities and attributes.

• Rapidly iterate on Hero’s/Characters based on feedback from playtests.

Tommorow Falls design process and core beliefs

On the project Tomorrow Falls, there was a belief in rapidly testing and iterating on designs - whether that was levels or heroes. There were pipelines set up so that a new hero could be created and tested within days (in a very basic form). The designers were given a lot of tools in UE4 to create the hero. Using blueprints (along with strict working practices), this became achievable. Gameplay was at the forefront of this project, so how it looked didn’t necessarily matter in the beginning - as long as the design of the Hero was communicated well.

For example, I created a hero-based vehicle which was meant to be more of a ‘protector’, and it’s toolkit was to cover allies and help them escape. The design had to look a little more bulky then the current heroes, so I put a little more effort into the look using primitives in Blender to represent the shape of a riot van. Luckily, I have strong experience using 3D packages so this didn’t take much time at all. With the tools that the programmers created, I made the vehicle have a ‘sense of weight’ behind it, so its turning circle was quite large and its acceleration was slow. I played with a few abilities at the start using blueprints, such as having it do a ‘smoke screen’, which allowed allies to retreat behind it, or being able to summon a statue which gave allies a health buff. This was a fun first hero to make, and it’s a shame that I am unable to share the screenshots, as well as its abilities, but I can go into more detail if requested.