Development Info

• Team Size: 400+

• Genre: RPG

• Engine: Creation Kit

• Release Date: September 2023

Design Challenges

Designing Space Combat for People who didn’t like Space Combat: Space combat is a niche gametype, and 6 degrees of control spaceflight is challenging even for players of that niche. My biggest challenge for Starfield wasn’t the hundreds of thousands of files I had to manage or the multiple time zones I had team mates in. Making space combat both deep and approachable for newbies to the genre while also staying within stated design guidelines and limitations was by far the most challenging work I’ve ever done in the industry. I had to work very closely with engineers and artists to fool and enable the players to be effective space pilots. Creative problem solving was paramount and so was recruiting both newbies and old hats to the genre to playtest my newest iteration with regularity.

Massive File Structures: Creating hundreds of ships for more than two dozen factions in game, each ship made up of dozens of modules, all with their own data sets required me to maintain the high level concept from the original designer and then integrate my own designs into the groundwork already laid down when pivots happened.

Perk Design: Revamping the perk system from the ground up for 2/3 of the game was a challenge, and required constant communication with gameplay engineers and artists to ensure that the new perks would actually work and be satisfying to earn. These new perk trees each had “capstone” perks that fundamentally changed how players interacted with the game world. Coming up with dozens of those was an exciting and satisfying challenge.

My Role

Owner of Ship Combat, Systems, and Balance of Modules:

• Designed and created Targeting Control System skill and combat system for ships

• I owned maintenance of overall game balance of the skills, abilities, and dozens of weapons with each new content drop

• Balanced and maintained hundreds of thousands of files related to ship modules and weapons

• Designed and balanced more than 200 ships and variants across 50 levels of progression

• Created hero and special ships for quests with unique abilities

• Interfaced with many other disciplines to ensure a quality product

Perks Perks Perks:

• The Perk system required a revamp and a capstone reward for each perk that uniquely changed the way players interact with the game

• Many new combat systems, both ship and fps combat, were created to implement these perks, pushing the engine and game further than ever before