Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising
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Awards
The Game
Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising is a violent Real Time Strategy Game based in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and a standalone expansion to 2009's Dawn of War II.
Find out more.
My Role
I was hired on as an Assistant Producer intern from May - August 2009 which led up to the feature complete milestone in September.
I was responsible for assisting the development of production plans, creating and delivering external builds to THQ and Games Workshop, creating release notes, supporting the community message boards, writing PR blog posts, creating screenshots for print and web publications, updating localization data, submitting bugs and updating the bug database, updating the team's wiki site, running internal and external playsessions, as well as other administrative tasks.
In addition to my production duties, I also took on design work, creating a mission for the single-player campaign of the game. I was responsible for creating the mission's objective, its secondary objective, the in-game cover, the level's item pickups, the enemy encounters, surprise attacks, and retaliations. It was my responsibility to ensure the level's overall mission design, flow, and enemy encounters were logical, well-paced, challenging, and most importantly, fun to play.
What I Learned
On the production side, I learned how a AAA video game studio works, and what it takes to develop a top-tier expansion pack.
I learned how a triple-A title is produced and supported post-launch. While working, I learned how to effectively communicate and work on a large interdisciplinary team, and how to balance my own time effectively. I was able to work on long-term projects and tasks, while appropriately taking care of tasks and issues that arose on a daily basis. I also learned the organizational process involved with assessing and prioritizing the entire team's tasks and bugs throughout development. In addition, I learned how to properly create and deliver marketing materials and information to the general public, including translated patch notes, screenshots and marketing buzz.
I also learned how to better prioritize my own time, solve unanticipated problems, and effectively communicate complex details to other team members.
Regarding the design work, I learned how to effectively create well-paced, fun and interesting encounters. I learned how to balance a level's difficulty, and how to ensure the level's pacing was interesting throughout. I was able to effectively create the mission by using Lua scripting (SCAR) and by using the world builder tool itself. Additionally, I learned how to to build, compile, and fix bugs, and design the mission within the context of the entire game.
My time at Relic taught me what it takes to make a top-tier title.
Preview my level!
