Game Designer

State of Decay 2

Technical Game Designer on State of Decay 2

State of Decay 2 Logo

On State Of Decay 2, I was a tech designer on a small team of Valkyries. We were brought on to support the game while it was live, so that the majority of the SoD2 team could move on to their next focus. My main accomplishments were:

  • A lot of bug-fixing

  • Making a lot of QoL changes that players had been asking for, including:

    • Making vehicles’ headlights stay on after you get out

    • Improving melee combos and finishers

  • Creating a new system to allow claimed “outposts” and “enclaves” to light up at night and to change appearance when claimed

    • Including support for environment artists to easily populate these prefabs with conditional lights and assets

    • This involved overhauling some of their pre-existing code, and injecting new code where need be

Primarily, I spent my time scripting in Unreal Blueprint, programming in Unreal C++, editing levels, and collaborating with teammates.


Quality of Life changes

I worked on a slew of quality of life changes for SoD2, including:

  • Improving the melee combo buffer system

  • Improving the responsiveness of melee finishers

  • Making vehicle health and durability based on vehicle size

  • Tracking your vehicle when you leave it, so the lights can stay on and its position can be shown on the map

And others, also mainly around melee combat, vehicles, and companions.


Enclave and Outpost lighting

My main focus while working on SoD2 involved modifying their enclave codebase to support asset swaps within prefabs, and building in a tagging system to allow environment art to fairly easily setup a prefab to make use of the new system. This allowed artists to set prefabs to have two states, an unclaimed state and a claimed state, with options of assets existing in one or both of those states. On top of the unclaimed/claimed states, power state had to be factored in, and other enclaves (enemy AI) could take over locations, which needed to be supported as well.

Stream Clip of Lighting Update
Full Stream Here