I was the Lead Designer on Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War.
Auroch was approached by Dot Emu and Sony Tristar to make a Starship Troopers "boomer shooter". I worked with the Creative Director to produce a successful pitch and then ran the project from this initial phase through to release and post launch support.
I lead the Design team and the project as a whole, creating a retro shooter based on the Starship Troopers IP. My work included narrative, systems, technical and level design as well as product ownership and management responsibility for the Designers on the team.
Ultimate Bug War was an extremely ambitious project for Auroch and was steered successfully through the choppy waters of: significant budget re-scoping, two rounds of layoffs, a corporate acquisition and the announcement of two competing products; Starship Troopers Extermination and Helldivers 2. It's a testament to the hard work and dedication of the team that we managed to ship the title to very positive user and critical reception.
The final game featured 13 levels spread across two different game modes, a Human and an Arachnid campaign. I designed and produced both campaigns simultaneously, defining the overall arc of the game and all of its content. I also took special control of the 3Cs for both game modes and handled the weapon and enemy feel and balancing. Towards the latter part of the project I did a large amount of debugging, profiling and bug fixing to help the Design, Code, Art and Audio departments to hit our performance goals and achieve a stable release.
