Orion is a first person stealth game where the player must ascend a mountain to close a portal spawning otherworldly beings armed with only a customizable bow.

With this project, one of my goals was incorporating a lot of choices for players to have in different ways. It took a lot of time coming up with a concept that included everyone one my team's goals. After a long period of discussion and brainstorming, we settled on a first person stealth game which we all found to fit our personal and career goals.

After we decided on the game, we were required to pitch it to a panel of six game industry professionals, they were hesitant at first due to the scope of the project, but we had a variety of solutions prepared that would allow us to solve lots of problems with the production such as using SpeedTree to populate the map with quality foliage, an in house analytics tool to better gauge what decisions players were making, and a third party sound library to make sure players were able to get as much information possible via audio. After we explained how we were prepared to cut specific content and solutions to big issues, they gave us the greenlight.

We immediately began prototyping our stealth systems and level design as we believed those two features would make or break our game. One of my goals was to incorporate a good amount of vertically in the level design of this project. I thought that making the overall progression of the level "Get to the top of the mountain" would be useful for this for a few reasons. First, it creates a clear path of progression for the player as the portal at the top is viewable from almost anywhere in the map, making it so players always know where their final objective is. Secondly, it allows players to view enemies and encounters they were able to stealth pass which during playtests we found to be rewarding for players.

During the second Alpha milestone for the project, we had found that players were all choosing to play very aggressively and basically ignore the stealth mechanic and stealth related abilities we had created. We initially thought this was due to the enemies being to easy to kill so we tweaked a few of their stats to make them more lethal. But even still players were able to push through most encounters by just killing all the enemies.

At this point in production, one of our programmers had been creating an analytics tool that would allow us to see a variety of different information such as times detected, shots fired, enemies killed and other types of information. While trying to solve the problem of players preferring an aggressive play style, I looked through the telemetry to see if I could find any information about why this was happening and what I could do about it. One trend I began to notice was that about 94% of our players were shooting over 50 arrows in a single play through (for reference there were only about twenty-five enemies in the entire level). I thought this was probably far too many shots for people to be firing and brought this to the attention of the team. This led to the discussion of and eventual implementation of an ammo system, which he had though initially the game wouldn't need. After we limited players ammunition availability, most players fired less than twenty-five shots in a play through, and would tend to sneak past enemies if they were able to, which is exactly the experience my team wanted.

Orion is available for free download here: https://aieseattle.itch.io/aiemoeorange