God of War Ragnarök (PS4, pS5)

I worked on God of War Ragnarök, leading a team in a year-long initiative to implement wildlife into the game.

We originally didn’t have any designers to spare, so I trained up and directed a team of five QA testers, mentoring them in design + tools, creating training documentation, and outlining best practices. Here’s a few examples of best practices I developed for the task:

• Place ambient wildlife in groups to make them more noticeable.

• Ensure wildlife placement feels true to nature. Examples: Don’t put a spider in a lake. Don’t perch stationary birds next to their natural predators (i.e. next to a lizard). Don’t place a flopping fish in a tree.

• Avoid creating intention with ambient wildlife without LD consent. For example, don’t make a path of lizards leading to a treasure chest.

With every facet of God of War Ragnarök, our game director would ask “How do we take what’s here and give it that extra push to make it the greatest game of all time?” That’s was wildlife team’s mantra was - we helped create those magic little details which give the game an unprecedented polish push.

The effort was a resounding success. We were one of the few teams that touched almost every area of the game and we delivered on schedule. One of the testers I helped train was even formally promoted to design.

Additionally, I helped implement and debug several set pieces such as the Runaway Train sequence and the Vanaheim Wishing Well. This project also gave me a chance to learn Maya, which I utilized to create IK collision, wall + ground collision, and tag surfaces with different collision materials.