Hogwarts Legacy
Platform: PS5, Xbox Series S/X, PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch
Tools: Unreal Engine, Proprietary (missions) - Universal - Excel, Visio, PowerPoint, Confluence, SharePoint, P4V, Slack, Zoom
Duration: 5 years 6 months
Team Size: Missions - 25 internal / 20 external; Hogwarts Legacy Team - 400+
Role: Lead Designer - Missions and Game Structure
Metacritic: 85 (PS5) / 90 (Xbox Series X) / 84 (PC)
Hogwarts Legacy saw me returning to Avalanche, now under WB Games, after a year with castAR as Game Director. In returning to the studio and signing onto the project, my role was that of Lead Mission Designer. Hogwarts Legacy went through many changes in that time, with my role shifting a bit as the game’s development progressed. Ultimately, my role was one where I owned and communicated outward the overall flow, structure and feature set of the game, headed up mission concepts with different teams, worked with tools programmers to help shape the features of the mission system, established standards for missions to ensure consistency across multiple mission teams from different studios, as well as unified UX experience across all missions. I acted as Lead Designer on the project alongside the Game Director, and had a hand in the direction of the “mortar” of the game (how the game played and felt with multiple systems interacting, and what wasn’t accounted for). This lead to design and direction on other features, including but not limited to Companions, Relatedness VO, Save Game, UX design, Fast Travel, and Stealth loops. Finally, I collaborated with both Publishing and QA, meeting weekly with each to take feedback from the Design Director and Executive Producer at WB Games and decide a path forward.
“In your down-time, you can explore the school, from iconic locations you’ve seen in the films to secret passageways that contain puzzles for you to solve. There’s even a few locations we’ve not seen in the movies, like the Hufflepuff common room.”
“Players will meet new friends in their time at Hogwarts, some of which will become companions. You’ll learn all about these characters’ backstories and embark on quests that relate to their lives. One such student is Sebastian Sallow, a Slytherin with a “troubling family past.”
Ultimately, the development of Hogwarts Legacy was a major shift in both culture and processes for all of us at Avalanche Software. This resulted in finding new ways to work inter-departmentally and across teams. It also meant trying to find what the right version of the game would be for not only our audience, but also for the aesthetic biases of the team. This resulted in a lot of lost design and production effort in redesigns happening throughout production, and a divided team for much of that time. But, the studio has been able to adopt new processes, as well as hierarchy, which has greatly helped gel the vision and collaboration. These will continue to improve moving forward into other projects.
Personally, I feel my role has been somewhere between lead narrative design on the project and creative direction on the team. Moving forward onto future projects, I would like to better establish early philosophy on approach to missions and writing across the game, biasing toward player stories and agency while honoring fan fantasies of any IP I’m involved in.
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