World Events and Secrets
Hogwarts World Events
World Events is the system that was created for the primary purpose of adding variation to the players experience. Things like the dragon that flies by in the open world that grabs a sheep and fly away, having the lake’s giant squid slap the windows of the Slytherin common room, or all the ghosts encounters that show up at night in various different ways are all part of the World Event System.
I joined the World Event teams further into production so much of the design work was largely complete by the time I joined. Working with our third party studios, the Hogwarts Team, and the Open World Team, we created dozens of different events that would take place in our game throughout the players experience. My role when I joined the team was taking up the Hogwarts design roll for the Events Team. I later took up the design work for the Open World half of the project as the other designer rolled off the project. Examples include design consistency, spawn chance, spawn placement and conditions, spawn density, variety of events, and prioritization for anything within the Hogwarts castle and some of the Open World.
The work I was responsible for was mostly placement and set up for every World Event that can be found within and around the school. These include the dragon that can fly over the lake, the squid saying hello here and there, and the students that can be seen drinking pepper up potion in the courtyards. I was also in charge of making sure the World Events in Hogwarts were well distributed and fit the overall feel that we wanted to create using World Events in Hogwarts.
Some details on the designs we worked on focused on each common room having a unique feel, so we gave each common room a World Event unique only to them. Examples include the giant squid in Slytherin, the flying snitch in the Gryffindor common room, etc. We also wanted to use the World Event System to really sell the idea of students having daily lives. Examples such as having students fly by on brooms, getting chewed out by a howler message as you passed by, etc. I was the LD responsible for settings those up and trained some contract LDs on setting up other World Events in the Open World later on in development.
Hogwarts Design
Design and Documentation
As the Gameplay Designer and Level Designer for Hogwarts castle a large portion of my role at Avalanche was to create and maintain all the design documents used for Hogwarts during production. Although I can’t show any of those documents I wanted to go over some of the things I worked on as the Designer of Hogwarts.
Starting as the designer for Hogwarts I was tasked with coming up with the design plan for the Hogwarts Castle. When I first started the castle was largely already made, but there was no gameplay present within the castle yet. Working with the rest of the Hogwarts team, a group of render artists, and another Level Designer we went about filling Hogwarts with as many magical things as we possibly could. Through the iterative process we landed on the gameplay you can see in the game. However, with so many different things going on in the castle we had to keep track of everything and how it was all suppose to work, where things were located, and how they related to gameplay overall. To aid in this task I created various documents, spreadsheets, and other design documentation to aid in the iterative process. I also collaborated with our QA teams to ensure that these documents were useful, not only to the Design Team and Production Team, but also to the QA teams, both internal and third party, as they went through and broke all of our stuff for us.
While planning out the gameplay of Hogwarts it was largely a combination of marrying systemic gameplay with memorable and unique gameplay specific to Hogwarts. These include things like lootable containers, fast travel, and collectibles being balanced with more bespoke gameplay like the puzzle rooms, the Depulso dungeons, and little secrets that we hid throughout the castle. My primary task as the Gameplay Designer of Hogwarts was designing, iterating, and pushing these features to final polish while collaborating with the mission teams, World Event Team, the Systems Team, and the Core Design Team to ensure a cohesive and enjoyable experience.
