M:AA 2 Design Pipeline work

Design Pipeline Work

While working on M:AA 2 I I helped revamp the Design workflows which I built in Confluence. We had a lot of ambiguity about the pipeline for designers. I built this during my own discovery in order to help build the conversation about improvements, create buy in of those improvements, and help any new hires that came to the project.

Pre-Production

Pre-production involved referring to our planned content cadence, having a character design kick off meeting to discuss heroes villains and any new grunt factions. Then we would design the animation requests and basic gameplay. Finally finishing pre-production with finalizing the design for the characters needed.

Scorn

Scorn was our in house Unity animation editor. It was used to implement SFX, animation timing, and sounds amongst other animation related goodies. Before we launched Designers and Animators worked very closely in this process before improvements to the pipeline, timeline, and Scorn itself allowed the Artists to perform the Scorn work.

Ultron Implementation

Ultron was our in house editor that we used to create the data that would be parsed into the game proper. Each entity (characters, missions, villains etc) went through 3 basic phases during Ultron Development

• Shell – The entity could be seen in game and doesn’t crash the game, necessary for Artist verification and placeholder content for data dependencies.
• Implementation – The entity is working in game has real gameplay, and is either actively being created or tuned for balance.
• Finalized – the entity is testable by Q/A for bugs and difficulty.