Relic Entertainment: August 2019 - Present

Company of Heroes is a World War Two real time strategy game. As a mission designer I was responsible for developing single player missions from paper plan to final. I worked with the rest of the mission team to establish what historical battles we would represent in the missions, and organize them into the order they’d appear in the campaign. During the planning phase of each mission I would comb through history books, documentaries, and aerial photography to research the history of the battles I wanted to represent. From there I would focus on the key moments of those battles to use as the framework for the mission objectives. After the paper plan was approved I was responsible for the grey-box layout, scripting the objectives and combat encounters, and setting up the narrative events and cameras for the mission and guiding its development to final.

There were some unique challenges to designing missions for CoH3. The missions for the Italian Campaign are accessed through a turn-based meta map. Before entering a mission Players are able to select either United States or British forces, and within those two factions there are various sub-factions called “Battle Groups” (Paratroopers, Armoured Company, etc.) which gives the players access to a variety of unit and ability combinations. This means that we needed to build missions without knowing exactly what units the player would have access to. The missions needed to be structured in a way that they could be completed by either of the factions, but still provide a challenge regardless of what units the player had access to.

There was also a second, linear campaign that we developed for the game which was set in North Africa. I established the order that the missions would be played in, and defined the player progression for upgrades and unit unlocks for each mission in that campaign.

Working on Company of Heroes 3 was an amazing experience. I’ve been a fan of the series since I was a teenager, so being also to help establish the direction of the campaign and to see players enjoy the missions I built was as awesome as it was surreal!

https://www.companyofheroes.com/en

NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS

- Developed 8 AAA Real Time Strategy missions from paper plan to final.

- Helped to define the overall direction of both single-player campaigns, and established the order that the missions would be played in.

- Created a series of tutorial videos to guide players in the creation of their own content in our publicly available editor: https://bit.ly/CoH3Tutorial

- Represented the game on multiple podcasts where I discussed the how we translated the real history of World War 2 into the missions: https://bit.ly/TTTPodcastCoH3