Wreck Runners

Title: Senior Technical Game Designer

Role: Game Designer/System Designer/Senior Technical Designer/UI Designer

Company: Disruptive Games

Platform: PC, Xbox, Playstation

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

I've been working on Wreck Runners since 2023 and I have had a chance to do a lot of interesting things. Wreck Runners is a squad based extraction multiplayer game with a shared drivable vehicle and physics based gameplay. The best comparison is if you crossed sea of thieves with R.E.P.O. My primary tasks surrounded prototyping systems using Unreal Blueprinting and the Gameplay Ability System to get content out in front of the team. I also designed several mechanics and systems in the game and played a big part in the overall design. I was also in charge of training designers in best practices and

Created a performant vehicle damage system that works with multiplayer in mind and shows realistic damage at the point of impact
Designed and prototyped a one-of-a-kind vehicle health system with associated HUD elements
Used the Unreal Gameplay Ability System to create effects and abilities for the project
Designed a performant destructible system that allowed for large destroyable forests in a multiplayer map
Created a dynamic weather system that would change the gameplay in the environment over time
Helped design and tune movement mechanics for the project
Created tools for designers to rapidly deploy new vehicles
Helped train designers in best practices for Blueprint scripting for the project

Technical Details

Read on for more details about my work on Wreck Runners

The cooperative player driven vehicle was a huge feature of the game. It is the focal point of the activities in game and it has to survive in order for players to complete a mission. Much of my work surrounded the various sub systems attached to the vehicle and the user experience taking the vehicle into combat.

The damage and repair system was my baby and it contains elements I have never seen in a game before. We didn't want damage decals and vfx be dynamically placed at the point of damage because the decals and the damage mesh we used needed a flat surface to look good. The system would grab the nearest valid damage point (determined by designers) near the point of damage, then spawn the damage actor under the cover of the explosion effects. The damage would appear to be dynamically placed, but in fact was planned.

When the vehicle was damaged, repair points would appear inside the vehicle. Sea of thieves had a similar system, but I wanted to give players better clarity about when those repair points would spawn. As the vehicle took damage, the health would drain from the right most segment. When the health dropped below a segment threshold, the vehicle would rock, the whole health bar would shake and a repair point would spawn at a point in the vehicle close to the location of where damage occurred. Players would then interact with the repair point and the segment of health was restored.