Hunter's gathering
01
Hunter's Gathering is a 3-player online co-op game set in the Horizon franchise universe.
With replayability and tactical combat at its core, its the latest announced project from the company Guerrilla.
I worked alongside the content design team as a level design intern and freelancer for over a year.
Guerrilla - AAA
Decima engine
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1+ year on project
ABOUT
NDA
Due to this project still being under NDA, I can only disclose limited information about the game, or my role in it.
Project responsibilities
Concepting
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Delivered 11 shippable gameplay spaces, including puzzles, combat encounters, and traversal challenges.
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Designed and owned several challenges and quests.
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Concepting, pitching, and prototyping interactive elements and gameplay systems.
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Balancing, and tuning gamemode parameters based on playtest data and director feedback.
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Polishing, optimizing, and bugfixing to deliver a stable experience for Alpha builds.
In addition to that, I also had an integral role and presence during sprint planning, director reviews, feedback sessions, ideation meetings... etc
I was quite active and involved in the strike team throughout my internship.
Workflow & Collaboration
Ownership of tasks
After the first couple months of internship, my supervisor had a lot of trust in me, and began giving me full ownership of the gameplay spaces or systems I worked on.
This meant:
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Handling communication and collaboration with other developers to align on a vision and deliver a polished end result.
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Following up and being responsible for my own Jira tasks and ensuring I met internal deadlines.
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Being responsible for keeping those features stable and polished for Alpha builds.
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Keeping documentation up-to-date, and ensuring my scripts were clean and commented for other developers to build upon and re-use.
After the first few months I started feeling more like a junior, rather than an intern. Transitioning to a freelance designer alter on did not feel like a change.
Dennis Micka -
Principal game designer
"Neil was my very first intern and boy, have I been spoiled! I don't think I could've asked for a better one. Neil brought bottomless energy and ambition to the project, which will be dearly missed now that his internship is over. I was able to confidently hand over any of my tasks and he'd find a way to get it done with and without my help. He proved over and over he has the technical skill and he miiight have cleaner scripts than I do."
Reflection
This being my first experience with the AAA industry led to a lot of learnings. I mostly learnt a lot about the development pipeline, the collaboration, and the hierarchy that goes into creating games and content to that scale.
I learnt about the pitfalls of AAA development, but also its opportunities, and how to generally navigate this environment.
most importantly, I just had a blast working on a project so much bigger than myself and anything else I had done before. I worked with really talented professionals, and got to become one of them by the end of my internship. I am incredibly grateful for my supervisor who saw how I worked and felt confident to trust me with so much ownership and creative freedom throughout my internship.
I was also very lucky to be assigned to such a small strike team. I was rarely confined to a single role, and thanks to that, I got to experience a much wider variety of skills, and parts of the pipeline. I especially expanded on my technical skills during this internship and I feel much more well rounded as a level designer.
I had an awesome time :)
