Star Wars™: Galaxy of Heroes

STAR WARS™: Galaxy of Heroes

From July of 2018 through July of 2020, I was part of the team at EA Capital Games working on Star Wars™: Galaxy of Heroes as a game designer. While there, I had the privilege to design iconic characters and ships from the Star Wars™ universe and bring them to life in game, along with the special events and encounters that showcase them.

In my time working on SWGoH, I became the studio’s subject matter expert on all things related to events and player vs. environment encounters within the game. I designed, documented, implemented, and balanced over 40 unique encounters across over a dozen in-game events and spearheaded the design and creation of multiple new event types including Epic Confrontations, endgame-caliber solo PvE events showcasing raid-like mechanics and complexity, and Advanced Fleet Mastery events, designed to showcase new Capital Ships and challenge players to master their abilities in order to earn them for their own fleets. These events have contained anywhere from 2 to 7 tiers of increasing difficulty, with each tier often encompassing multiple battle encounters with custom adversaries with unique AI parameters. See below for examples of events I’ve been responsible for.

In addition to crafting exciting events, I designed, implemented, and balanced four units (two characters & two ships) from the ground up, provided initial kit designs for two more, and reworked two additional characters that were already live in the game. SWGoH unit creation encompass everything from early drafts of abilities & mechanics, to implementation, custom AI parameters, meta-target balancing, edge-case testing & theory-crafting, and everything in between. While working cooperatively with other designers is paramount to a successful unit design, each unit is the primary responsibility of a single designer throughout the process.

Through my work on units, events, and specific battle encounters, I cultivated a “try first, ask second” design ethos that helps inform both my encounter designs and my contributions to feature & systems design requests. What do I mean by try first, ask second? I always try (within scope/reasonable time & effort) to find a way to accomplish what I’m after within the current limitations of the systems I work with before asking other disciplines for resources. Sometimes a little bit of creative problem solving is all it takes to make a vision into reality. Other times new tech is required to make those visions real. Either way, I strive to put something on the screen as often as I can in order to sell my ideas and requests. See the “Separatist Might - Acklay Encounter” section below for an example of this approach in action that made it all the way into the live game.

STAR FORGE SHOWDOWN - Darth Malak

I had the opportunity to spearhead the design of and bring the first Epic Confrontation event to life in SWGoH. Called Star Forge Showdown, the event introduced Darth Malak, the final boss from the beloved BioWare classic, Star Wars™ Knights of the Old Republic, into the game by recreating the final boss encounter from KotOR (with some SWGoH flavor thrown in).

I was tasked with creating an event with the level of complexity and puzzle-like mechanics found in SWGoH’s guild raids. Luckily, KotOR’s final boss battle is comprised of a number of elements that I was able to draw inspiration from to inform the final design of the event encounters. These include Malak’s ability to drain the captive Jedi held in stasis around the arena, and the captive Jedi themselves, which became the central interaction around which the “puzzles” played out.

The event ended up being comprised of two encounters, one representing the “light path” the player could take in KotOR, and one representing the “dark path,” with character dialogue pulled from each, respectively, in order to elevate the authenticity of each encounter for SWGoH players with fond memories of the classic title.

Most mechanics were shared between the two encounters, with the exception being a passive ability granted to the player’s Jedi Knight Revan or Darth Revan, depending on which encounter they were in. These passive abilities, layered on top of Malak’s own unique event abilities and AI parameters, combined to create two very different experiences despite having a large amount of shared DNA between them.

Star Forge Showdown became an instant hit with players. It became one of the only examples of content in SWGoH in which players would replay encounters just for fun, trying to best their previous strategies or find what kind of disadvantages they could put themselves at while still claiming victory, all without any rewards connected to subsequent completions of the event.

Clash on Kamino - General Skywalker

The second Epic Confrontation event in SWGoH, Clash on Kamino, introduced General Skywalker, the version of Anakin Skywalker seen in early seasons of the Star Wars™ The Clone Wars animated series.

This event brought with it several challenges common to SWGoH content. What source material do we adapt? How do we incorporate the characters we want players to bring into battle? How do we create difficult encounters with solvable puzzles, not just random chance?

Because the required characters for Clash on Kamino varied quite a bit, from ships like Anakin’s Eta-2 starfighter, to Light and Dark Side heroes like General Kenobi, Padmé Amidala, and Asajj Ventress, I expanded the event to four tiers from the previous Epic Confrontation’s two. I chose to loosely adapt the Clone Wars episode “ARC Troopers” because it encapsulated ship combat, ground combat, and showcased several of the characters we intended to show off. This approach allowed me to take the player from ship combat to ground combat with a narrative journey that made sense.

Encounter design time had to be split up between more battles than before and had no shared mechanics, which meant that no battle in Clash on Kamino had quite the same level of puzzle-solving with mechanics as with the Star Forge Showdown event.

Nonetheless, I’m incredibly proud of how the event turned out, given the challenges that it presented. I’m particularly proud of the second encounter in the event, in which you have to take down General Grievous using General Kenobi and his allies. Players are tasked with defeating the two Droidekas before they can damage General Grievous, but Droidekas are known for their nearly-impenetrable shields, and that factors heavily into the challenge the players have to overcome to win the battle, providing the core of the mechanical puzzle players are tasked with solving.

I also was able to get away with sneaking in a number of puns (“General Conflict” being the name of the encounter between General Grievous and General Kenobi, for example) and references with this event, so it’ll always have a special place in my heart for that alone.

Separatist Might - Acklay Encounter

June of 2019 saw the release of Separatist Might, the Dark Side half of SWGoH’s Geonosis Territory Battle experience. Territory Battles are large-scale PvE conflicts that guilds can participate in. They span several phases across several days, with the difficulty ramping up from one phase to the next.

Near the end of the development cycle for the Territory Battle, I was pulled in and asked to punch up one of the premier encounters of the TB; the Acklay. This ferocious beast was to be the star in a special boss battle within the experience.

My approach was to try and create a 3-way battle, something we had never done before in SWGoH, in order to sell the conflict as being not just between you and the beast, but between you, your Galactic Republic enemies, and the beast. Without getting into the specifics and giving away information I’m not at liberty to discuss, I’ll just say that with some creative gameplay solutions and by working with the art team to make sure things all looked good, I was able to make my vision a reality without needing any new tech or changes to the game’s battle system.

The 3-way battle created an interesting amount of design space, and came with its own set of hurdles to overcome, like setting up custom AI to help make the whole thing play out the way players would expect it to. Utilizing this custom AI alongside summoning, our newest gameplay feature at the time, and throwing a unique player ability into the mix combined to create a fun & challenging encounter with elements that had never been seen before in the game.

Flight of the Falcon -
Han’s Millennium Falcon

My first foray into events more complex than a Marquee event was with Flight of the Falcon, the Legendary event that introduced Han’s Millennium Falcon (you know, THE Millennium Falcon) into SWGoH.

This was the first event that really required me to drill into custom difficulty tuning and what I learned building this event would continue to serve me throughout the rest of my time working on SWGoH.

I got to have a lot of fun designing this event. I had the opportunity to create several unique enemies using Rebel starfighters we hadn’t yet used in the game, including the A-wing, B-wing, and Y-wing, and I worked closely with our art team to storyboard the amazing intro cinematic to the event, which our motion designer lovingly recreated in even higher fidelity to create the teaser video embedded here.

This event will always remain one of the highest points of my time on SWGoH, having introduced the most iconic ship in all of Star Wars™ in addition to being one of the best learning experiences for me while working on the game. Flight of the Falcon was featured on the official Star Wars™ website where I’m quoted talking about the event! Check it out here.