Assassin’s Creed Origins
This was the very first video game that I worked on professionally – two weeks fresh out of university. My work mainly centered in the Faiyum region of Egypt. Despite my inexperience working in a professional capacity, I was fortunate to work with colleagues and a manager that entrusted me with several advanced tasks and content that accelerated my process in learning both the proprietary software we use and the processes involved in shipping a Triple-A video game.
Locations • Missions • Other tasks
Locations
I had the opportunity to work on a variety of locations. From tiny abandoned towns to sprawling forts, the experience gave me a chance to work on the different layers that make up world building in Assassin’s Creed Origins and to better understand how they work together.
Karanis and Bakchias
- Learned the process involved to build a location
- Familiarizing myself with the collaborative process
I helped design these two locations. Karanis was an opulent town crowned by a huge temple while Bakchias was a crumbling abandoned town occupied by refugees and used by rebels as their hideout.
The video starts in Bakchias with the player riding towards Karanis. The bulk of the video portrays the different parts of the town. The player rides back after completing a mission objective and the video ends in Bakchias.
Being presented with the opportunity to work on a variety of content from rooftop navigation paths, to the inside of Karanis Temple, to old forgotten tombs hiding treasures, I had the opportunity to learn how to design different types of content and experience how they all come together. Equally important, I learned how collaborative the process is and the importance of communicating well and often with the other stakeholders.
Note: I did not work on the mission featured in this video
Kerkesoucha Granary
- Inheriting a major location
- Learning how to create compelling levels
Kerkesoucha Granary is a fort, the largest type of military location in Assassins’ Creed Origins. Being a military location, it is heavily gameplay driven as the space would have to be able to accommodate for the player approaching it from any direction and playing it in any playstyle. This particular location was initially worked on by a more senior designer and passed on to several other designers before landing on my plate.
As the general layout and big strokes were already in place when I took over it, most of the work that I did for it involved expanding on the available gameplay opportunities in the location. For instance, a space might have a courtyard with a few towers surrounding it. A few examples of this was to place oil jars near spots where groups of enemies rested, create navigation paths connecting the towers, and strategically placing cover to introduce more opportunities for stealth.
As a Level Designer, there was a lot of emphasis on grounding our levels. Asking ourselves questions like, “where do these people sleep? how do they get their food supplies? would they defend this space this way?” helps with making a more realistic setup. Not only would this make the space more believable to the player, but it also makes it easier for the player to understand what’s going on and anticipate things such as movement of enemies, usage of space, and building layout.
Missions
Missions were the predecessor of quests. This project was done during an interesting time in game development where gamers were demanding more player agency through dialogue choices and multiple outcomes but not many games were doing that yet. We were exploring ways to do this within the limits of the engine, but were only able to fully express this in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey when the engine properly supports it. I inherited both missions from a designer who was leaving, but this was early on in production that it was very much like starting from scratch save the general premise and some minimal setup.
Curse of Wadjet mission
- Learned how to pace the gameplay better in missions
- Explored ways to introduce player choice
This mission was instrumental in teaching me ways to pace narrative and action moments better in a mission, and how one can be cleverly weaved into the other. Writing for it was fun too; being able to give the NPCs unique personalities and getting to hear what I wrote being brought to life by voice actors.
As mentioned above, we explored ways to introduce player agency in the missions. Due to the tech limitations, this usually came in the form of having certain steps in an objective skippable if the player knows what to do next, the option to not have to kill some less-important enemies, and designing key scenes to be able to be coherent regardless of where the player approached it from. As a team, these are things we build upon and applied in the subsequent games we worked on.
The Bride mission
- Explore non-typical missions
- Explore multiple ways to start the mission
Occasionally, we wanted to explore a more human side of the protagonist with missions that are not the typical ‘Save the world’ type. The Bride was inspired by a video I saw about a cop successfully saving a person who was about to jump off a bridge. I went on to research more on this topic such as ways to correctly respond in such a situation, the way the person is likely to behave, and the process of deescalating the situation. This was the foundation that I build the mission upon before introducing more gameplay elements to it.
We explored ways to create player agency while organically starting the mission. There wasn’t a mission giver. The player can start the mission by either being in proximity to the woman or if they successfully reached a high point nearby, triggering a custom camera that points towards the woman. This gives the impression of a random encounter, much like how a cop might encounter a situation while on patrol.
Other tasks
- Worked with the ObjectBank team to create the Wadjet snake statuette. Modeling a first pass in 3ds Max before it was refined based on my model and the references I provided.
- Wrote a first pass of dialogue and flavor text for the missions I worked on. The writer came in much later to refine it.
- Was given ownership of a sub-region that I had to build up from scratch. Unfortunately, this was cut in a rescoping exercise. However, the experience taught me a lot on region planning and working on content from the most macro to the most micro for both Level Design and Mission Design.
Reach out!
You can contact me via email or LinkedIn.