Table of Contents

1. Game Summary
2. Game Features
3. My Work – Summary
4. My Work – Details

Uncover the Mystery: Fight through the streets of 1960’s America as you uncover the declassified truth behind mankind’s first enemy invasion.

Tactical Combat: Use your strategy to your advantage: enter Battle Focus to slow down time and execute your next move, commanding your squad with a variety of tactical actions to turn the tide in your favor.

Strategic Reflexes: Turn an enemy misstep into your strategic advantage. Give tactical commands on the fly to outsmart the enemy and make split-second decisions to save the lives of your squad.

Be the Leader: As William Carter, a highly intelligent special agent, call the shots and pull the trigger. Formulate the plan of action, execute well-timed ambushes and flank your attackers to obliterate the threat.

No Second Chances: Pay the price for mistakes – permadeath will make you value your squad mates more than ever, and make losing one of them all the more painful.

Customization That Counts: Train each of your squad mates into unique specializations, allowing for a dynamic combination of skills to compliment your play style.

In “Signal From Beyond,” the third campaign mission, the player rendezvouses with a field team, infiltrates an alien structure and retrieves a key piece of enemy technology.

The level was used for the domestic and international hands-on press demos when the game was announced.

This game featured Mass Effect-like combat where you could give your squad combat orders and it also had RPG elements, including player choice (to a limited degree). This mission was to feature a rescue of an ally behind enemy lines. I designed a defend scenario involving this agent on the roof of a building and was looking to push it further and make it more interesting. I was able to work with a gameplay programmer to prototype giving the player a one-off command ability in the squad-command wheel menu (think the player and ally power wheel from Mass Effect). We used this to allow the player to detonate bombs that the ally had placed around the plaza in front of the building – giving the player another means of dealing with enemies while reinforcing the narrative conceit. This proved popular and was approved for shipping and it also spun out into a slightly larger feature and was used by a number of other Level Designers in other maps for different one-off abilities.

I was also able to work with the narrative team to give players the option to convince the ally to come back to base with you (rather than go out in a blaze of glory as he wants to due to being infected by an alien virus). This affects whether he’s present for the rest of the game or not. He was originally supposed to just die.

Additionally, I got to design and drive a ton of environmental storytelling in this level, which I’m super proud of. I was given a lot of free reign and was able to devise and tell a secondary story that establishes recurring characters and their plight during the alien invasion. This secondary story has a complete arc from beginning to end that players inclined to explore can discover as they play through the entire level.

My Responsibilities

• Designed and drove level from pitch to gold.
• Scripted combat and non-combat gameplay, events, streaming, checkpoints, objectives, waypoints, and VO.
• Collaborated with Level Artists to build the 3D level layout and assemble visual scenes.
• Worked with a team of writers to develop the high-level beats and iterate on the narrative script.
• Wrote all objective, objective summary, waypoint label, and context-sensitive interaction text.
• Implemented and maintained the path network, cover objects/markup, gameplay pickups, and narrative pickups.
• Optimized content to meet performance targets and fixed bugs.

In “The Last War,” the sixth campaign mission, the player chases an alien infiltrator through the XCOM base while also struggling with the protagonist’s fractured psyche.

The level contains the big narrative twist and originally called for one-off gameplay segments that helped to support the narrative twist of the level (that the player character was being controlled/influenced by an alien organism since the start of the game) which I prototyped and implemented early passes of. They were ultimately cut due to resource constraints.

This was a fun level to work on due to the narrative twist and the originally proposed one-off gameplay. We played around with having the player move on rails during specific segments but still be in some control (able to shoot and use powers) as the player character (really an alien parasite) and the perceived player character (the player’s human avatar) struggled for control. This was meant to end in a poignant moment where one of the main characters is killed by the human avatar (turns out human you’ve been hosting is a massive jerk). We decided to keep that character around though and once that bit got cut, the lead up didn’t have as much oomph (plus not doing it at all would let us spend engineering resources elsewhere). In the end, it’s still a fun level with a bunch of spectacle set in the bowels of a shadowy government organization that’s housing a bunch of dangerous aliens.

My Responsibilities

• Designed and drove level from pitch to alpha.
• Scripted combat gameplay, events, streaming, checkpoints, objectives, waypoints, and VO.
• Collaborated with Level Artists to build the 3D level layout and assemble visual scenes.
• Worked with a team of writers to develop the high-level beats and iterate on narrative scripts.
• Wrote objective, objective summary, waypoint label, and context-sensitive interaction text.
• Implemented and maintained the path network, cover objects/markup, gameplay pickups, and narrative pickups.
• Optimized content to meet performance targets and fixed bugs.

In “Operation: Firestorm,” one of the optional missions, the player infects an alien structure with a virus and then escapes through a burning forest.

I worked on it for 2 weeks between alpha and beta. I assisted with some combat encounter work and bug fixing.

My Responsibilities

• Iterated on the scripting and enemy composition for the first 2 combat encounters.
• Collaborated with a Level Artist to bring 3 of the level’s combat encounter spaces to a beta state.
• Fixed bugs.

In “Operation: Hawkeye,” one of the optional missions, the player chases and confronts an enemy VIP who escapes custody.

I worked on it for 2 weeks between alpha and beta. I assisted with some combat encounter work and bug fixing.

My Responsibilities

• Iterated on the scripting and enemy composition for the first 2 combat encounters.
• Collaborated with a Level Artist to bring 1 of the level’s combat encounter spaces to a beta state.
• Fixed bugs.

“Hangar 6: R&D” is a DLC for “The Bureau: XCOM Declassified” released on October 8th, 2013 for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. It has 10 challenge levels that test players with large-scale combat encounters. I worked on challenge missions 1, 4, and 10.

My Responsibilities

• Drove 3 challenge levels from pitch to gold.
• Scripted combat gameplay, events, streaming, checkpoints, objectives, waypoints, and VO.
• Collaborated with Level Artists to build the 3D level layout and assemble visual scenes.
• Worked with writers to develop the high-level beats and iterate on narrative scripts.
• Wrote initial passes of objective, objective summary, waypoint label, and context-sensitive interaction text.
• Implemented and maintained the path network, cover objects/markup, and gameplay pickups.
• Optimized content to meet performance targets and fixed bugs.