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Platforms:

PC, XBOX One, PS4

Company: Studio Wildcard

Release Date:

September 1st, 2016

Role: Technical Designer

As a man or woman stranded naked, hot & dehydrated in a mysterious desert, you must hunt, harvest, craft items, grow crops, & build shelters to survive.

The Scorched Earth ARK DLC was the first piece of content I shipped at Studio Wildcard. This new desert-themed map with loads of new content, which was initially handled by our contractor studio Efecto, was passed along to Wildcard within days of the new gameplay team being hired. Receiving the rough first pass in July and having to be ready to ship just before PAX West in September meant that we had very little time to do the dauntingly large remaining work. Luckily, this undertaking ended up being an insane trial-by-fire that gave us the chance to rapidly become acquainted with the ARK codebase and unfamiliar tools in UE4. It was 10 weeks of incredibly hard work that showed me just how capable Studio Wildcard is at doing amazing things in a very short span of time. We ended up giving GameSpot and several other game journalism sites an exclusive first look at the new map just before launch.

 

By the time we shipped, the core gameplay team had created the Manticore boss, worked on getting the new dinosaurs and weapons ready for launch, and even got to act in the trailer.

Below are the dinosaurs that I worked on for this DLC:

After launch, we were flown to Seattle for PAX West 2016, where we had an incredible booth and got to show off the new DLC to our many awesome fans. 

The Manticore was the new Boss Fight for the Scorched Earth DLC. Creating it from the ground up was the first responsibility of the new gameplay team, and as such we got to make everything from his A.I to his spline-based movement system and attacks. When Scorched Earth shipped, the Manticore was by far the most complex and versatile boss in ARK.

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