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J. Cody Winchester
Game Designer
Days Gone
Days Gone is an action-adventure game set in the open world of an apocalyptic Central Oregon.
Overview
My two years at Bend Studio were primarily spent on Encounter Design in the open world and the scripting and polishing of every Bounty Side Mission. I also took ownership of the Infestation Zones, areas that were riddled with Freaker Nests that would need to be burned out to reduce the numbers of Freaker enemies as well as make fast-travel through said area possible. Additionally, I assisted the systems team with populating the world with our huge list of crafting items to be scavenged and melee weapons that could be outfitted into powerful tools of head-bashing.
Encounter Design
Populating the world with ambient encounters was the first task I was given at Sony Bend. My team was also tasked with coming up with different types of encounters and after creating a myriad of varying events began populating every corner of the world with them. One of the variations I took over was pitting different factions of enemies against one another, which required different spaces depending on the type of enemies I went with.
Infestation Zones
Maintaining, populating and improving the Infestation Zones was the first big open-world system I was entrusted with, which gave me an opportunity to work with our terrific environment art team very closely. The first thing I did to improve these encounters was to include a small group of crows to be perched around the nest that acted like a dinner bell to the Freakers sleeping inside during the daytime.
Nighttime was a whole other beast that needed improving, with the later established rule of more Freakers being out during the later hours I had to work on making the Infestation Zones reflect this. I worked with our world enemy population designer to implement a new population system for nighttime that would have the areas around the nests covered with Freakers. This made a huge difference in when the player decided to tackle these installations and really upped the intensity when needing to go through an Infestation at night.
Bounty Jobs
These Side Missions were some of the most rewarding pieces of content to work on, largely because I was placed in charge of scripting and polishing them up to completion. Generally, I was given a rough outline of a story and script for VO that had to be implemented, but from there I was really able to spread my wings with visual storytelling and creating a myriad of ways to approach and different populations depending on the time of day.
Item Population
An open world game with crafting demands a lot of items to be populated wherever the player can run into trouble. I worked consistently with systems and technical designers to ensure that our item population was fair with our survival theme and complemented our many craftable items.
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