A Day in the Life of a Mission Designer

This week's CoH-Dev post covers a typical day in the life of one of our Mission Designers. Darwin gets into some pretty technical details and highlights some of the creative solutions a designer needs to come up with when building an exciting mission. Leave him any questions you might have and I'll get him to follow-up! - JohnT_RE 

Hi! I’m Darwin and I’m one of the single player Mission Designers on Company of Heroes 3! In earlier stages of the production phases of this game, I was responsible for designing and implementing prototypes of several of the campaign missions and then fleshing them out into a functional state. Now, with the project steaming ahead into the later stages of production, my tasks have gradually shifted over the last few months into shaping, maintaining, marshalling and adding completed assets into, and tuning these campaign missions under my responsibility into playable and fun levels for people to enjoy. 

A typical morning starts with a Missions & Maps Standup, after checking and responding to emails and messages, I join in. The meeting starts with the usual greetings and banter between the various team members. I’m working from home, and it’s great to see people and their pets on screen. For some of my teammates, I haven’t seen them in person since the beginning of the pandemic, but I’m looking forward to seeing people in person when it’s safe again. Especially with a mug of coffee from the staff kitchen. I guess game developers really are fueled by caffeine! 

Here I inform my teammates about the statuses of the various missions under my purview, relaying any relevant information regarding bugs and new things that have been added as well as indicating which tasks have been done, are for review, or have not been started yet. Nothing too unusual today, just gradually shifting things from implementation and content adding to polish. We seem to be making a lot of progress on that front, although we’re still waiting on some assets to hot drop in! The meeting breaks, and we say our goodbyes for now. 

Today, I’m playing through and focusing my work on [REDACTED], one of the main Italian campaign missions I am working on. Because we’re in the later stages of production, I’m now checking for opportunities to tune the gameplay, working on polishing tasks (make things look cooler), and in general checking for bugs. As we are responsible for different missions, we rotate between them over time rather than tackle every one willy-nilly at once, to keep things organized and scheduled. As it happens, I’ve rotated back to this mission which hasn’t been looked at in a while and there are definitely issues that have cropped up as new features get added and assets are updated. 

Due to shared development on maps (us map designers are paired with our awesome environment/map artists), this isn’t unexpected - whenever some new assets get added, I just have to make sure I have things hooked up on my end. One prime example of something I encounter is that a key building’s assets had been dropped in recently and it now needs to have some properties added, otherwise the game will crash after trying to reference things that don’t exist! Fortunately, all I have to do is go into our Essence Editor and open its entity blueprint properties and drop in the [REDACTED] property extension. I save the changes and go back to test and, “Huzzah!”, the fix worked.   

After a few more items have been tackled (like playing through some sections to get a “feel” for tuning and making spot adjustments and talking to programmers after I notice bombs were flying horizontally like cruise missiles), I look up and notice that it’s now past noon! I quickly put everything on hold, lock the computer, and step outside for some much needed fresh air, sun, and lunch.   

An hour later, I log back in and after checking and responding to messages that I got while I was out, I join a scheduled “kickoff” meeting to discuss the creation and integration of a specific [REDACTED] vehicle I coincidentally need for the [REDACTED] mission I was working on before lunch. There were a couple of pre-meeting discussions the last couple of days where I contributed some research material and images, but here is where we come up with the plan to make and implement the asset. Fortunately, it is a modification of an existing asset so putting together a skeleton object has already been done and stubbed in which makes it easy to put in, within the time left. All that’s left is to discuss how we want the vehicle to look and that’s where my reference material comes in. We decide on a specific camo pattern and markings used that were closest in time to when [REDACTED] mission occurred in real life, as well as how it’s armed. Satisfied, we break and I’m confident our artists will be able to make something awesome looking that they can pop into the game in the near future.   

I go back to work on [REDACTED] mission. Another example of work that needs to be done is replacement of placeholder systems that were stubbed in during earlier phases of development to be replaced with something that is more functional once it becomes available. In this case, there are certain player abilities I am triggering on the map for placeholder fire and effect off map artillery strikes, but because of non-deterministic properties, it’s not always doing what I want.   

We have a newer, more precise way to call in an artillery strike which involves calling in an “action” from within a “prefab” object at a specified time and location, so I implement that instead. The older implementation relied on a roundabout method that utilized Lua scripting and was subject to external factors that affected it (such as the ability origin point from the nearest map edge) which made things difficult to time. After a little bit of blood, sweat, and tears I complete a whole series of retrofits. My cat decides to curl up in front of my keyboard, so I take that as a sign to take a break.   

The final task I need to tackle in the day is more work to bring it all together – adding the appearance of the [REDACTED] vehicle I collaborated with my team members on earlier in the day into the level. Actually, there will be a few instances of this vehicle – they will be in a small “convoy” of sorts. First, I set the “path” these vehicles will drive through the map by placing some waypoints down to form a path.  Next, I use our prefab system to tell the game where to start spawning this convoy and also define how they will behave and to follow the path I just placed. I also make sure I plug in some voice lines to tell the player what’s going on and think about any other UI considerations. Finally, I edit the conditions that kick off this particular segment. I save and “burn” the new changes into memory, and then proceed to test my handiwork.

Oops, an error occurred! Turns out I messed up a start condition, but it is quickly fixed, and everything appears to be working as intended now. I quickly check in everything before the build lock deadline for the day! My work for the busy day is now complete, and I log off in search of dinner.

Let me know what other details of Mission Design work might interest you!

- Darwin