My original role on BIOSIDE was to be the sole systems designer, a big responsibility on a project steeped in novel tech. As our team structure developed to meet the project’s needs my role evolved to include leadership over the gameplay feature team which comprised over half the total dev team.

We quickly concluded the physicality of VR was the most engaging part, so I designed everything from the enemies to the weapons with maximum interactivity in mind. Initial prototyping found that high interactivity on the weapons was dev resource intensive, and the specificity of the actions clashed with the frantic zero-g combat that was at the core of the project’s vision. The weapon selection was refined to include only the three most impactful firearm archetypes, and their interactions were redesigned to be streamlined and intuitive.