Connor Runyon

Documentation for an Audience

In order to facilitate smooth development across such a large, multidisciplinary team, the design team created a large amount of documentation for the reference of ourselves and others. Specifically, I was in charge of mechanical documentation, such as defining and detailing player and enemy actions.

Since this documentation had to be useful to many different people with different goals, I split the information into chunked sections intended for separate audiences. For example, documentation for the tech team included very specific details regarding behavior and the parameters that should be exposed for designers to tweak. Conversely, I included sections consisting of simple overviews for artists and other designers to scan.

Like all design work, it was crucial to always keep my audience in mind—even when the work was for purely internal use.

Enemy Design

As a 3D action game, creating an interesting array of enemies for the player to combat was a core aspect of the experience. As the team’s combat designer, I worked extensively on refining the interactions between player and enemy.

Each enemy type was designed to encourage the use of different playstyles to counter them. Since the player had a variety of combat options (melee attacks, melee combos, ranged attacks, dashes, etc.), pushing them to utilize their entire repertoire was the guiding principle behind how I designed enemies. For example, the Agile enemy type keeps its distance from the player and moves erratically, making it difficult to hit with ranged attacks. Instead, it puts the player on the defensive, encouraging them to wait until it goes in for an attack to strike back.

I meticulously detailed enemy behavior early on so that our tech team knew exactly what features would be important down the line. Likewise, I also detailed specific requirements for the minimum viable product first-pass of each enemy. Consequently, we could use those first-passes to iterate early on in development before dedicating time to their more expensive and advanced features.

Learning Unreal Engine

Even before Knight Light, I had development experience in both commercial and custom engines, but this was my first experience with Unreal Engine 5. As our entire team was new to the engine as well, we all underwent the experience of learning it in parallel with development. This inevitably led to many hurdles, but by working closely with our tech team, I managed to come out of this project with a solid understanding of developing in the Unreal Engine.

In particular, I extensively utilized many systems such as blueprints, behavior trees, and the animation system. By making use of the resources available to me and my prior experience with other engines, Knight Light helped me widen my development skillset to include Unreal Engine 5.