Trailer
MY ROLE
During my time on the the first DLC of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, I worked as a Technical Designer. I brought level design ingredients from the prototype stage up to a shippable quality as well as assisted Level and Quest Designers with their content and helping them fix bugs. This required working with many different disciplines involving: Level Design, Directors, VFX, Audio and Props.
As well as my typical Technical Design duties, I also created some exploration quests that encourage players to engage in some of the open world content in the new region added in the DLC.
In addition to this I assisted the Cinematic and Narrative team in creating some cinematic set pieces throughout the campaign and polishing some dialogue sequences.
Avatar was developed in the Snowdrop Engine which meant working with node based visual scripting systems for things like quests and ingredients as well as the sequence editor for more cinematic purposes.
The Great Games Ingredients
In the second mission of The Sky Breaker DLC, the player must partake in a timed race event on back of a Direhorse. Throughout this race are a few ingredients I worked on that the player can interact with (pictured above). The timer ticks down and the player must reach the end of the track before the timer hits 0.
One ingredient I worked on is a target that the player can shoot with their arrows. Hitting the outer ring of the target adds 5 seconds to the timer while hitting the pouch in the middle adds 10 seconds and also releases colourful powder to provide feedback to the player. It is impossible to reach the end of the track without hitting a few targets.
​
Another ingredient is a hurdle that can either be jumped over or shot to break apart and ridden through. There are two variants of this ingredient of varying heights making use of the Direhorse's new charge jump added in this DLC.
​
Finally is the arrow pickup ingredient. A bundle of arrows hangs from a rope that the player can pick up by riding through them. This is to ensure the player always has enough arrows as they cannot craft more during the race.
The Bitter End Boss Fight
During the end of The Bitter End quest, the player must sabotage a Valkyrie to prevent it from taking off. I worked with Level Design to create the gameplay for this moment. The Valkyrie has four thruster engines that periodically shoot jets of flame that can burn the player. They must avoid this fire and use their SID to change the angle of the thruster, allowing them a clean shot up the engine. Once the player has destroyed an engine it will rotate to be horizontal and can no longer burn the player. Once all engines are destroyed the quest will continue.
Animated Sequences
Throughout the campaign of The Sky Breaker are several non-mocap cutscenes I worked on. I structured these cinematics in engine based on briefs from the cinematic director. This involved working with cameras and positioning characters and props in the scene and applying animations to them. Below is one of the cinematics I worked on in The Bitter End quest.
Dialogue Sequence Polish
During development of The Sky Breaker, I also polished some sequence of dialogue that happen between the player and other NPCs. This involved fixing any animation glitches, adding animations to compliment what characters are saying and adjusting the camera to look at certain things. Below is an example of one of these sequences I polished.