Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics / Lead Designer
Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics [Disney Interactive] was created in-house at Disney Interactive's Bellevue office. When I arrived on the project I was given a few weeks to put together a design for a game that would combine the large-scale competitive play of War Commander, the real-time tactics of X-COM and the world of Marvel's Avengers - not a simple task. Even though we were a Flash-based game running in browsers, MarTac (as we called it internally) made smart use of modular art assets and F2P mechanics to create an amazingly complex game with a tonne of content.
As lead I was responsible for designing many of the new systems MarTac required, such as the world map, early iterations of player base-building and new tools we would require to build the game levels and interactions. Generally these were early sketches and design documents that were then iterated on and expanded by the design team. I also met with Disney executives to pitch our ideas, give progress updates and field feedback. Later in production I ran the gameplay side of the production schedule, worked with the art department on new assets, continued to develop our in-house tools and managed the designers across the studio.
Production Materials
The first concept of the "battle map" overworld that would represent every player's home base as well as story content and resources.
An illustration from a team presentation on the flow and drain of resources in our game.
A wireframe layout for our new in-house character editor.
An early flowchart from the NPC design document, showing the internal decision making for a Support class character.
An example diagram showing how we deal with UI overlay and object transparency to deal with the fact that our game had a fixed orthogonal camera.
A vertical state-by-state flow to illustrate the kind of events, resource flow, timers and player actions that would happen in a player's base during gameplay.