Genre: Survival Horror
Engine: UE5
Release: 7th November 2024
Role: Junior Designer, Intern
Joined: February 2023, during production
Responsibilities: ​
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Enemy AI (Barks)
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Game Feel
​​Metro: Awakening is a story-driven, first person adventure game set in the tunnels of a Post-Apocalyptic Moscow. A VR-exclusive title, M:A is a spin-off of the critically acclaimed Metro series.
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I worked on this title for 10 months, as an intern and then as a junior designer. My responsibilities ranged from implementing the barks of the enemy AI, to balancing the game feel.
My Work
On the AI
Barks are the voice lines that NPCs shout while in-game. They are a core part of how the enemy AI communicates its status and intentions to the player, as well as give the illusion of intelligence. I worked on the lines said during combat and stealth.
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The main skills I had to apply were:
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Planning & Researching New Features
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Technical Unreal Knowledge (including blueprints, HTNs, components and visual logger
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Iteration and Playtesting
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To implement the barks in game I had to:
- research barks in the metro series and other games
- write down over 700 barks in 98 categories under an outside deadline
- implement them in engine, adding to the already built HTNs, creating new components for the characters and interacting with different systems.
- improve them based on feedback from QA and peers.
preliminary research done on barks in other games.
Example of a Combat encounter
Example of a Stealth encounter
On the Game Feel
When I started out at the company, I was assigned the responsibility of improving the game feel of the weapons, while taking into consideration their overall balance. To do that, I had to:
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Understand what attributes and variables had an influence on game feel.
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Keep track with a table how different configurations of value felt during gameplay.
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Iteratively improve the recoil, sense of weight, explosion radius, haptics, and hand grab poses of different weapons and objects.
I kept track of how different values influenced the feel of the weapons.