3rd Place – Game Design
Over the course of the year, I participated in Ubisoft Toronto NEXT 2023. The competition, which is open to students and recent graduates from universities in Ontario, sets out challenges across a number of game development fields, I participated in the Game Design challenge.
The first part of the challenge was to choose a Far Cry game, and design a new humanoid enemy type to add to it. First making a Creative Brief in the form of 10 or fewer slides describing what they are, how they work, and why they should be added to the game.
I designed the Eden’s Gate Gadgeteer, a paranoid stealth focused enemy for Far Cry 5. The enemy works in a two-stage system, based off of the normal enemy behaviours. While idle, they see through the eyes of a small commercial-style drone, which patrols a fixed path through the area. Then, once they’ve been alerted, instead of searching for the player like a normal enemy, they run around the base, placing down traps until they can’t anymore. They have access to three traps: razor wire, which slows and makes loud anything that moves through it, bear traps which damage and stun things that walk over them, and trip mines, which stretch across doorways and windows, exploding when tripped or shot.
This is a fairly complex enemy design which brings up a lot of concerns about their interactions with other enemies and the environment, as well as a lot of edge cases in behaviour. I got the chance to go over all of these concerns and flesh things out deeper in Phase 2, where I wrote a full fifteen page Design Document.
After submitting the design document, I was interviewed, presenting my work directly as well as answering questions related to my design. My efforts got me to third place overall, which is an achievement I’m happy with.