Creative Leader & Game Designer

Game DesignLeadershipUI / UX

BATTLETECH – Heavy Metal

Work Areas

, ,

For

Harebrained Schemes / Paradox Interactive

Date

November 2019

Info

http://battletechgame.com/

I was honored to serve as the Lead Designer for the final BATTLETECH DLC: Heavy Metal. This was an exciting undertaking for a number of reasons, and also bittersweet. It was incredibly important that we end the development of the series with a bang and left the product in a superb final state.

I was responsible for establishing our guiding direction and leading our development vision for this last release, establishing concise designs, thorough documentation, and reviewing the work of various team collaborators.

Project Pillars & Concepting

High level brainstorming and initial whiteboarding for Heavy Metal began roughly 6 months before its eventual release, with only a relatively small team tapped for its intended production cycle. This placed very clear constraints on our capacity and timeline, so planning and clear communication would be especially critical in making sure we could release a satisfying update on time.

I formed an initial pre-production striketeam with our UX and engineering leads aimed at fact-finding and the creation of what became our three guiding pillars:

  • Awesome ‘Mechs:  The solid core of BATTLETECH that players can’t get enough of. We needed to give new ‘Mechs with hero treatments, and to do it at scale. The more new ‘Mechs the better, but they needed to feel new and unique, too.
  • New Toys: New weapons create exciting avenues for improving our overall gameplay. This would allow us to make significant improvements to BATTLETECH’s tactical combat, and breathe new life into existing ‘Mech designs.
  • More Power: It’s always good to feel powerful when you’re facing your enemy on the battlefield. We wanted to focus on force multipliers in combat to even the odds and addressing the diminishing returns of fielding lighter ‘Mechs in the late-game.

Using the pillars as a guide, my striketeam talked about lower-level ideas and brainstormed what was feasible to add within our given constraints (art pipeline, flexibility of existing codebase, communication methods), and then came up with a priority list based on impact relative to effort.

ABOVE: A collection of whiteboard images documenting some of the pre-production striketeam brainstorming process.

With these ideas in hand, I held a kickoff meeting where a team member from each area involved in the content creation pipeline was given the opportunity to bring up concerns or improvements. I also created a comprehensive development process list for our content areas to make sure this working group was informed as possible.

BELOW: An example of comprehensive content pipeline documentation I created to improve team understanding to boost efficiency and mitigate risk from an inherently complicated process. (Link opens full PDF)

After this consultation with discipline leads and area experts, our team felt comfortable committing to 10 new ‘Mechs and 8 new weapons or equipment – notably including a ‘Mech and weapon class developed in-house and wholly unique to the broader BATTLETECH IP.

ABOVE: A portion of the resulting pre-production planning document showing targeted items, their MVPs, and estimated impact to the game and approximate effort.

Design & Development

With a production plan locked in, I dove into leading the design of the various major content areas for Heavy Metal. We utilized a small group of external playtesters at major milestones to sanity check our work against the established pillars, make balancing changes, and generally refine gameplay.

Mechs

The main focus of Heavy Metal were its ‘Mechs and they therefore needed to feel both powerful and special. Drawing inspiration from the original BATTLETECH tabletop sourcebooks I crafted the notion of special fixed equipment that bestowed a unique behavior for each of our new ‘Mechs. My specific intent was to reward players with unique experiences when they opted to include one of these units in their force or encountered them on the opposing side of the battlefield.

BELOW: An example of a design and production spec for one of the ‘Mechs launched with Heavy Metal. (Link opens full PDF)

The Bullshark

I had the opportunity to work very closely with our art director, Marco Mazzoni, to develop a wholly custom ‘Mech not drawn from BattleTech canon. This hulking monster of metal that would eventually be known as the Bullshark and featured heavily in Heavy Metal’s campaign content. Marco crafted the visual design of the ‘Mech from scratch and worked with me to bring the mechanical construction and gameplay behavior to life. This became our flagship ‘Mech featured in the key art for the expansion and also uniquely mounted our most devastating new weapon: the Thumper artillery piece.

Weapons

I also lead design for all of our new weapon classes and their variants, utilizing the same valuation approach I developed for the 1.0 launch to achieve economic and combat power balance. Weapons creation was exciting in different ways than creating new ‘Mechs; any given weapon could be used on all previous ‘Mechs and so had the potential to vastly change the combat gameplay experience over the course of a player’s career. Each weapon was subject to extensive playtesting and tuning to make sure they they felt useful and integrated as a part of the entire weapons and equipment ecosystem.

BELOW: An example of a design and production spec for one of the new weapon classes launched with Heavy Metal. (Link opens full PDF)

COIL Beams

I was honored to have the chance to develop a new class of weapon from scratch, something not draw from any of the existing BattleTech source material. A longstanding critique of the game had been that lighter ‘Mechs become useless against the power curve of heavier units as a players campaign/career progresses. As a way to approach this, I developed the COIL class of energy weapons which deal more damage the further the ‘Mech sporting them had moved on its turn.

This provided a unique advantage biased toward lighter, faster units that – when used with skill – could cause them to punch way about their weight. Though they needed to be light enough in mass to mount on smaller ‘Mechs, I made COIL weapons extremely bulky to balance their power and make them inefficient to use on larger-but-still-speedy ‘Mechs where mounting more weapons is generally a better tactic with the space available.

Reception to the COIL weapons was very positive and helped to reinvigorate interest in lighter units and experimentation with them as viable options deeper into a player’s career.

Flashpoint Campaign

I Worked closely with other design team members assigned to the mission and narrative content of the flashpoint campaign included with Heavy Metal. I generated a set of unique MechWarriors and ‘Mech loadouts for use in the climactic final encounter and also oversaw its playtesting and tuning. I drew again on existing BattleTech lore and the story developed by our team to create these pieces and inspire the special behaviors I developed for them.

BELOW: A screenshot of the design document for the special MechWarriors and ‘Mechs featured in Heavy Metal‘s flashpoint campaign, “Of Unknown Origin”.

Supporting Updates

While Heavy Metal was a paid DLC, it released with two free supporting updates which included a plethora of other additions and refinements.

I was specifically responsible for addressing the consistent player feedback regarding the campaign and career mode’s economy, rewards, and progression. This generally aligned around three areas: a lack of ability to find the type of gear they were looking for, a general lack of a variety of choices for purchase, and the near-total absence of rare and exotic items – including those featured in previous paid DLCs!

This required an extensive overhaul; I elected to tie reliable inventories of weapon and equipment classes to the industrial type of a given planet in the game’s sandbox map. This required a small amount of new UI but much more in the way of data auditing and updating to create the intended result. I ended up creating a suite of Python scripts to parse our existing data and then produced a web-based tool for editing planet metadata. This allowed me to rapidly execute on my design and make tunings based on playtest data.

ABOVE: A screenshot of a portion of the planning matrix I created to organize the disparate and random pre-Heavy Metal equipment economy into a more reliable and understandable categorization method. (Link opens full PDF)

BELOW: A shot of the custom web browser tool I developed to modify the existing planetary and store data and export it back out into a game-ready format. JSON files are read in and HTML generated from Python scripting to create the starmap in a near 1:1 layout to that present in game. Using hotkeys, I could then click on a given planet to assign it a type of industry tag (using an iconography shorthand). Upon hitting “SAVE”, the current state of the map is read and the appropriate JSON files updated and made ready to put back into the game’s runtime files for play.

The second free update was planned even before Heavy Metal was fully out the door. Working purely within the constraints of our existing data-only content authoring capabilities, I crafted a final set of new ‘Mech variants, some further unique equipment, and added new vehicles that could be found in the game’s procedurally generated missions. Specifically, this resulted in (16) new ‘Mech variants, (8) new vehicle variants, and (6) new weapons/upgrades.

Marketing & Community Engagement

As part of my supporting leadership work, I interacted with our playerbase on a regular basis in various contexts. I could often be found answering questions on the forums, and wrote an extensive, three-part developer diary series that explained the process and design philosophy behind Heavy Metal and its related updates – much of this portfolio entry is summarized or copied outright from those posts, in fact.

Heavy Metal Developer Diaries

I also hosted a number of promotional Q&A livestreams in the run-up to Heavy Metal‘s release. I also had the honor of presenting Heavy Metal to thousands of fans on-stage as part of Paradox’s PDXCON 2019 in Berlin.

Livestreams & Presentations

Leading the development of this final major release for BattleTech completed an unforgettable arc of my career and allowed me to grow in my leadership and holistic design skills. It also allowed me the opportunity to interact directly with business requirements, production constraints, and community engagement needs.