Star Wars Squadrons

Star Wars: Squadrons

“Star Wars: Squadrons is a flight simulation space combat experience, played from a first person perspective. Players take control of starfighters from either the Galactic Empire or the New Republic navy. In these ships, they can utilize the movement of power between the ship's functions of weaponry, shields and engines to defeat their opponents in combat.”

Responsibilities

Star Destroyer and MC75 - Flagship Design

From the start of development for Star Wars Squadrons I was appointed as the feature owner for the Capital Ships feature - which included the titles Flagships; the Star Destroyer and MC75.

These ships play a crucial role in both the game’s multiplayer mode and single player campaign.

In the multiplayer mode players must destroy each other’s flagships in order to win a match - the design of these ships needed to include mechanics to compliment the player ship’s gameplay, pose an engaging combat challenge and encourage squad based coordination to take down these deadly behemoth ships.

The flagship’s pre-existing subsystem (shield generators) required gameplay mechanics to be designed and implemented as well as formalizing 2 new subsystems (targeting and power) that I both developed, designed and implemented - this work materialized into exciting new mechanics such as flying beneath shields, disabling subsystems using Ion Lasers, and launching coordinated attacks to destroy subsystems in order to enable closer combat around the flagships, all while defending your own flagships from suffering the same fate.

These subsystems created more play space for the game design team to identify the core strategies and coordination we wanted to encourage in our audience.

Both flagships also needed to have a suite of functional turrets of various kinds (turbo, ion and missile) that could target players with enough accuracy to pose a serious threat while still allowing pilots to realistically dodge and fly around the onslaught of danger. Both ships also feature a functional hangar bay which players could fly into in order to change their ship loadouts during the match.

The completion of the Capital Ship feature was a monumental achievement for the team and myself as these complex, technical boss battles of game development came to life through all of our hard work.

In the games single player campaign Capital ships took on the role of posing clear map objectives as well as the games story focusing on a new flagship called the “Star Hawk” - which is a massive rebel flagship assembled from the graves of demolished Star Destroyers.

The ship needed to support multiple objective types that required special tuning for movement within the levels.