Since January 2023, I have worked as a Combat Designer at Gunfire Games helping to create Remnant 2 and its DLCs. My work has focused on designing and implementing enemy characters. I’ve grown in a wide range of technical and soft skills to ensure a polished character is ready on release day.

Created in Unreal 5

*Trailer does not reflect my work

Notable Characters I’ve Released

The Forgotten Kingdom DLC

Harsgaard Variant

I created a variant of the Remnant 1 Harsgaard boss as an elite class enemy for the Forgotten Kingdom DLC. I wanted to bring a fresh visual style to the enemy design of Remnant 2 which is often dark and horrifying. I noticed environment art was modeling new flowers, so I built a concept around them that highlighted the beauty of the DLC’s art direction. This choice saved concept art resources, as character art didn’t require anything more than my concept and the environment team’s flowers to move forward with modeling.

The gameplay of the Harsgaard variant was a blast to explore, since his presence in size and frequency allowed me to push the mechanical bounds of what an elite class creature is capable of. With limited animation resources, I’m proud I was able to create fresh and interesting attacks that deliver on the presentation of the creature.

Key Learnings

  • Being a variant of an existing enemy, the goal from the start was to save rigging and animation resources. With a tight DLC deadline, I was able to stretch myself to save resources for other departments as well.

This is the concept art I kit-bashed to pitch the creature

The Bloodless Heir

I was given a set of animations for a character that was fully animated for a past melee project but never used and told to create an enemy. This was some of the most interesting work I’ve done at Gunfire. Because I had virtually no team resources for the character, I had to get creative about how I pieced together gameplay. This involved things like blending in and out of animations with different poses to create workable attacks or dilating animation play rates to use 1 animation for 2 different purposes. Working within such strict limitations was an exciting opportunity to test my own expertise since I couldn’t fall back on the expertise of my team members.

This was also my first experience implementing an isolated combat encounter. I got to collaborate with level design, quest design, and environment art in a way I hadn’t before to create the arena.

Key Learnings

  • It took me 2 work days to create this character’s gameplay due to the absence of any inter-department bottlenecks. I’m proud of this timeline and want to bring this sort of speed to other characters.

  • Often while prototyping I will piece together functionality using a hodgepodge of existing assets. With this character, I had to take this process and make it work for final polish.

Protector of the Grove

The design direction for the deer fight was to create a comically difficult enemy with minimal animation resources. I went to work repurposing animations from the base game to create a bread and butter charge attack. I then asked for one swipe animation that we could mirror to get more visual variety out of a single animation. These two attacks nearly fulfilled the creature’s design goals, but players needed space from the creature. Using an additive recoil animation, I was able to create a projectile attack that worked nicely with a strafing motion. This rounded out the creature’s challenging gameplay while meeting the presentational standard, all while staying within budget.

Key Learnings

  • I was able to create a shooting attack while strafing using existing locomotion and additive animations. This was incredibly efficient for the animation budget and is unique from other projectile shoot animations in the game.

Flying Ravager Statue

This creature was an exciting new challenge to implement. It was the first flying character I’ve worked on, but is unique in that it does not exclusively walk or fly, but rather transitions between the two navigation states in combat. This meant a wealth of technical issues I had never considered. To reach final polish for this character, I had to dive deep into the more technical side of combat design. I was able to grow in my understanding of character pathing and how it interacts frame-by-frame with our proprietary state machine. I also developed my ability to debug and bug fix. The result is a surprising move-set that presents well in many spaces that aren’t ideal.

Key Learnings

  • Reaching polish on this character meant a deeper understanding of systems core to combat design including character pathing, the inner working of our state machine, and debugging/bug fixing.

  • This was my first flying character, and we were on a tight deadline, meaning I had about 1.5 weeks to learn how flying characters are animated and implemented. I’m proud I met that deadline without sacrificing quality.

Concept Art Created by Chris Anderson

The Awakened King DLC

The Forgotten

I was tasked with designing and implementing our new soldier class character for the first Remnant 2 DLC. We started with defining, animating, and implementing unique locomotion as it is the bedrock of dynamic combat. This involved lots of learning about blend spaces, UE5 animation blueprints, and creating movement that could traverse their unique sewer environment without feeling too linear or lifeless.

I then moved onto implementing gameplay. I was directed to fit this creature in multi enemy scenarios without it drawing all of your attention. To achieve this, I created the balloon attack- a unique slow moving set of projectiles that is randomized each time. Later in development, the creature was given the resources for a variant and re-defined to be the primary enemy in a dungeon, so I had to revisit these mechanics. I’m proud to say I was able to preserve the core design through smart BP optimizations and introduction of a higher pressure jump attack.

Key Learnings

  • The number of projectiles and the fact that their movement had to be adjusted in scripting created great learning opportunities for optimization and replication. Also, all 8 pustules on the creature can be interacted with by players, so I had to be resourceful with my components and their logic.

  • I learned so much about the use of randomness in combat encounters. Players are justifiably quick to get frustrated with anything that is not easily predictable. Additionally, using random elements creates considerable work to guarantee those elements are consistently interesting in every scenario.

Image, video and VFX credit - Chase Nielsen

Key Learnings

The Sunken Witch

I co-designed the Sunken Witch- a mini-boss and elite class enemy for the Awakened King DLC. My primary responsibility was setting up the locomotion and attacks that were shared between the boss fight and standard encounters. Additionally, I helped pitch concepts for the mini-boss encounter before shadowing another designer that took over the implementation.

Key Learnings

Image and art credit - Ben Donley

The Penitent Variant

I was tasked with designing a variant of an existing enemy in the game- the penitent. Remnant 2 lacks enemies that support one another through healing or shielding, so we decided to explore that idea here. One significant problem we faced was that the enemy was underwhelming if ever encountered alone. With Remnant 2 being procedurally generated in certain areas, this was an important problem to fix.

My solution was to augment the character’s existing abilities whenever it was by itself. This created a great moment of escalation in combat when players focused down the penitent’s allies, as it enraged and attacked you in new ways.

  • This character required extensive scripting since many of the mechanics we were introducing did not exist in the game already. Additionally, the character had quite a few unique VFX/SFX queues and loops that could be triggered by different events. This meant I had to be precise and clean with my scripting so that teammates could collaborate effectively with me.

  • Because this character’s locomotion was already complete, I was able to quickly prototype designs and then iterate on them. This character started as an enemy that spammed one attack that both healed allies and damaged players, and 1 week later was close to what players see in game today.

Mini-Boss Fight was Implemented by Designer David Elliott

  • This character was my first chance to collaborate with animators, so I had to learn quick as we created the Witch’s attacks and locomotion. I grew in my ability to accurately describe and foresee how animation choices affected gameplay, as well as learning when to let animators freely express their expertise.

Although my focus has been combat, I’ve also contributed to the following areas and more!

  • NPCs

  • Scripted Environment Set Pieces

  • Enemy Encounters, Spawns, and Environmental Emerges

  • Level Design

  • Character Concept Art