Blockout Phase

Development Time: < 6 Months

Team Size: ≈ 10

Riot Mode was designed to provide players with a more concise, combat focused experience. A few elements I wanted the Riot Mode arena to have: no dead ends, varying room sizes, and some sense of verticality.

With the blockout completed, I worked with our AI Engineers to stand up a looping, wave spawning system and I also prototyped what would be that start of the progression and economy loops - chests that function as our storefronts, and hazards that require resources to activate. From there, we were able to continue to identify pain points that impeded the flow of the game while also brainstorming and iterating on multiple new features to keep the experience from becoming too linear or stale.

Gameplay Systems

Coming out of the blockout, our Systems Designers rolled onto the Riot Mode Team full-time and began production on gameplay loops and rulesets. We looked at both classic arcade games and rogue-likes for inspiration on how to make Riot Mode repeatable and have players feel a sense of progression so they would want to come back and play more.

During this iteration phase, I worked with the Systems Designers on brainstorming, implementation, and testing.

Content Lock

Leading to content lock, we had to focus on ensuring the game ran at a stable framerate. Some hurdles included loading sections of the map based on player position, improving the vent system for enemy mobility, optimizing enemy meshes, and tracking player stats while simultaneously updating all of the UI elements. Through collaboration across the various department reps on the Riot Mode team, we were able to overcome these hurdles and achieve creating a game mode that’s a completely different take on the combat in the Callisto Protocol.

My experience from Riot Mode is showcased further in my work on [REDACTED]. The ultimate level design goal of Riot Mode was to facilitate combat by allowing players and enemies to move throughout spaces freely. It was exciting to be able to expand on the design learnings from Riot Mode and push those ideas even further.