My work

  • Worked on the quest logic of several main and side quests.
  • Created and developed several random encounters to populate the worlds of the game.
  • Supported the design and creative direction of the quests.
  • Created interactive systems used in the quests I was tasked with.
  • Worked on the AI agents to reproduce behaviours that were used for quests.
  • Created and implemented level layouts with the agents and interactions.


Project specifications

  • Third Person Shooter
  • Single player game
  • Exploration-based game
  • Made in Snowdrop Engine

The necessary premise of working on Star Wars: Outlaws is that I did not join the team in Massive as an employee. Ubisoft was confident in the project and involved several studios around the world in the development of this product. As a result, I joined as part of another studio “cell”, i. e. a semi-autonomous group of developers from Ubisoft Milan. This cell, as the others, had a series of features to deliver before completing their commitment to the Swedish studio monumental project. However, cells had to adapt to Massive’s organisation, and this created a bit of a dissonance with my work title: as in Massive there were no “Technical Game Designers”, I was temporarily a Level Designer. In essence, my work remained the same.

Along with other game designers (each specialised in their own field, but none of the “tech” kind) and artists, I went to Malmӧ as part of the “Milan cell”. Our main goal was to deliver several quests (among which the Sarlacc one, a cool reference to the original movies), to support the main and the faction storylines. For this purpose, I worked on:

  • Creating the logic of the quests our cell was tasked with.
  • Contributing to the design of such quests and their layouts.
    • Most of my efforts went on to prototype such designs in the engine, so we could quickly iterate based on the feedback of testers.
  • Creating and developing player-driven interactions.
    • These were particularly useful in some of the faction quests, as many were about interacting with the environment, collecting items or killing specific entities.
  • Working on the behaviour of AI agents so that they could play specific behaviours during quests.

My work was not limited to that, though. While working for the “cell” I was also borrowed by Massive directly to work on random encounters, as a game with the size of Star Wars: Outlaws had to have plenty of them to keep the players engaged. I created plenty of these, from fauna roaming the deserts to enemy patrols. Each one of these came with its own challenge, so I also had a lot of fun while working on them.

This was a very rare opportunity I was glad I seized: while Massive Entertaiment was the lead studio, the plethora of other studios involved made this the biggest project I have ever worked on. I learnt a lot working in Massive, but my experience was not perfect due to some issues, for instance:

  • The systems I worked with were not designed optimally and there was also not enough documentation. It took a long time to get them working as intended. Sometimes it was easier to create a custom solution rather than working on the official one.
    • For instance, the level layout setup for creating random events was complicated and that led me to create my own tool in Python to generate the base setup more quickly.
  • There were way too many people working on the project and the organizational structure looked unprepared to deal with them. It was usually difficult to find people that were responsible of the systems I needed to work with.
  • As it is tradition with me in Ubisoft, I did not get any onboarding and needed to figure out how things worked with no guidance.

Working with my colleagues from Milan was great. We created a lot of great content that millions of players enjoyed. I am glad I had the chance of working on this project, even though we could not contribute to this from the start.