top of page
Gunnar Headley
Software Engineer
Roles: Lead Producer, Mission Designer
Outbreak is a humans vs. zombies live action RPG that happens one week every semester around the DigiPen outdoor campus. Humans use nerf guns to fight off zombies during the day and missions each night. Once tagged by a zombie, you play as one for the rest of the week. After playing for a season I decided to join the developer team for this game and worked my way up to being the Lead Producer. My job entails creating a schedule for the team where we would ship a mission week by the first few weeks of a semester. I also work heavily on mission design and long-term goals for the game's brand.
What I Worked On
Mission Design:
One of the biggest parts of Outbreak is the Mission Design. As a team, we try and create missions that are fun and engaging for both humans and zombies. When designing a mission, we have to take a lot of things into consideration to make it successful. We had to consider the number of humans and zombies there currently are. If we were designing a mission for Thursday, we would expect the majority of players to be zombies. We also practiced modular mission design where we had the ability to change parts of a mission while it was taking place. This gave us more control of the gameplay in case the players did something we were not expecting.
Program Management:
As the producer, I not only managed the team but also focused on making sure the game's overarching goals were achieved. One of the big goals for the game is to give new designers experience in a different kind of multiplayer game. New team members are generally freshman and they get to have experience in multiplayer design. We also focused on constant testing and trying to keep the game fresh. Before we shipped a mission week, we would internally test new mechanics or builds before they went to the public to make sure they did not break the game.
bottom of page