Senior Designer – (Quest Design & Dungeon Design teams)
Blizzard
Designing Quests, Side Quests, and Dungeons also means integrating most other gameplay elements aside from art: NPC creation and placements, encounters, doors, puzzles, locks, quest items, enemy creation, boss creation, writing and integrating dialogue, points of interest, cutscene calls, scripted events, NPC barks and etc.
- Designed Quests, Dungeons and Points of Interest for campaign (Neyrelle’s storyline in Fractured Peaks)
- Designed and integrated side quests and dungeons found throughout the world
- Participated in weekly Quest and Dungeon reviews, provided feedback and iterated based on feedback to my content
- Coordinated with writers, leads, production, vfx, and animators for level events and cutscenes in campaign quests
Notable Skills and Software Used:
Proprietary Engine, Slack, Google Workspace, Zoom, OBS, Adobe Premiere
Summary of work specifics:
- NPC’s: Creating, placing, naming stationary NPC’s, assigning relevant animations
- Dialogue: Writing placeholder dialogue for each NPC where applicable to give depth, lore, story, and accentuate mood.
- The writers would eventually go over temporary dialogue and add/remove/edit as needed
- Doors: Ensuring doors are interactable when the correct phase of the quest is active
- Followers: Vigo and/or Neyrelle need to be maintained when the player crosses certain regions.
- IE: followers can become a non follower, walk to a waypoint, play an animation, bark a voice line, then become a follower again.
- Assigning animations, bark voice lines, unlock and open doors at the designated moments etc
- Dungeons: Editing algorithmically-generated dungeons so proper dialogue voice lines play at correct times. Adjusting based on pace and feel, and creating POI’s (Points of Interest) when necessary to ensure storyline and gameplay beats are hit at correct moments.
- Testing before, during, and after Quest completion that quest selection sets are active at appropriate times so the user can (and can’t) access the proper/correlating content when the quest is active, complete, or when the user hasn’t reached these points of the story.
Dungeon Creation Walkthrough
Here’s a public-facing walkthrough video on YouTube that gives a general idea on how dungeons are created in the Diablo series.
Ill Tidings + Tarnished Luster
- Ill Tidings – Visit the Cathedral of Light to speak with Reverend Prava about Lilith’s (evil horned demon) return and seek their support against her. Prava responds with “Vigo’s Report” quest item and directs the player to Yelesna to find out more
- Tarnished Luster – You take Vigo’s Report to Yelesna, where you learn about how demons, ghouls, and monsters have overtaken the mines and are sealed off to the villagers of Yelesna for their own safety, putting strain on their well-being, economy, and have become starved. The knights direct you to the mining camp to find Vigo.
The Knight and the Magpie + Undertaking
- The Knight and the Magpie – You find Vigo, meet Neyrelle, and follow them into the mines to pursue Lilith and learn about Neyrelle’s missing mother before reaching a sealed gate
- Undertaking – Fight through the dungeon “Condemned Mines,” inspect jammed lifts, locked doors, and escape deeper underground before the mines collapse.
Light’s Guidance
- Light’s Guidance – Player returns to the Cathedral of Light to tell Prava about Lilith and Vehnard, only to find she’s gone to Kor Valar (to set the player up for the next quest)
Wayward + Shroud of the Horadrim
- Wayward – The player searches for Neyrelle in the Mistral Woods after she left to find the hidden Horadric Vault; when you stumble upon a glowing tree, leading you into the the Darkened Holt dungeon.
- Shroud of the Horadrim – The player fights through enemies and hordes, continues to search for Neyrelle in the dungeon, eventually finds her and completes the dungeon which clears the “Shadowed Glade” (the dungeon entrance) which was blocking the pathway to the Horadric Vault
Fledgling Scholar
- Fledgling Scholar – Neyrelle follows you into the Horadric Vault (Dungeon with a POI at the beginning), to search for anything to help you cross the Black Lake, fighting demons and eventually defeating a Boss “Tchort” to recover a crucial Horadric spellbook and return it to Neyrelle.
