Wayfinder: July 2023-January 2024

Personal role: Quest Designer

Developer: Airship Syndicate

Publisher: Digital Extremes/Independent

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Genre: Online Action RPG

Platforms: Windows, PS4, PS5

Responsibilities

• Working with Writers and Worldbuilders to realize stories and themes as playable content within the world.

• Cinematic demoing and implementation work for boss intros with Animation using Unreal Engine Sequencer.

• Placing discoverable items and interactions in open world spaces.

• Finding places for and pitching novel content to create and draft.

• Documentation of features.

Technical Details

• Unreal Engine 4 Blueprints

• Google Sheets

• Confluence and Jira

• Asana

Quest Designer for the team; responsibilities involved writing out first draft narrative ideas, placing quest content within generated and handcrafted spaces, playtesting and providing feedback for team members, and being a resource for Unreal engine information.

Wayfinder is a third-person action RPG with MMO elements developed by Airship Syndicate available on PC and Playstation 4/5. My work on it was as a member of the narrative team in a quest design focus.

I worked in Unreal Engine 4.26 with an emphasis on custom blueprint and data table work.

As a Quest Designer, I regularly worked with our writers and Level Design team members to communicate stories in ways that would be fun to play while taking players between relevant points of interest that remained compelling.

I worked with QA members to help communicate features and fill test needs they might have, as well as surfacing information and tracking down technical answers to help both their team and mine.

In addition, I did exploratory concepts of boss hunt introductions with the Animation team, implementing their existing animations using Unreal Engine’s Sequencer and authoring my own using pre-made assets to demo concepts.

My work most visible in the game currently was during the Eventide limited time event where I setup the difficulty progression quests for the seasonal boss and expedition.

I also did work that may be upcoming, including a feature unlock quest I pitched which played with Wayfinder’s tone and side characters, along with discoverable lore items and moments scattered throughout the game’s environments.

Wayfinder is an early access title available on Steam/PS5/PS4