HAWKED
Match & Game Mode Designer
Apr 2022 - May 2024
I owned high-level match design and game modes — how players enter and spread across the map, what drives their objectives, how often any type of event happens, and how the pacing and variety of a session feel overall. I worked across most of the project’s teams to keep everything aligned with the match vision. I turned existing content into a cohesive “mystical island of trials and artifacts” experience by specifying missing systems like extraction, in-session power progression, and loot randomization and tying them into a single loop. I also built and analyzed match telemetry to understand session and player flows, then iterated on objectives and pacing to sharply reduce mid-match quits and noticeably improve first-match KPIs.
Genre: Third-person extraction shooter
Release: February 15, 2024
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows, Xbox Series X|S
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
MY DESIGN
The Glyph System
Here I’ll walk through the development of the glyph system to show how I approach systems design.
When I joined the project, players collected abstract “clues” during the match. Once they collected five, the location of the treasure vault was revealed and they could open it.
Inside the vault is an artifact, the match’s main objective. The team that opens the vault must extract with it via special exit points, while everyone else tries to take it from them.
I was given three initially unrelated tasks:
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Come up with an overarching fantasy for what these clues are and how they allow players to open the treasure vault.
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Solve the problem that, during playtests, many players preferred to focus on other activities and ignore the trials, waiting for someone else to open the vault.
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Add more variety to matches.
For the fantasy behind clues, I proposed turning them into symbols — Glyphs — each depicting a simple, easily recognizable object, so players could remember them quickly and call them out to teammates over voice chat.
Each completed trial rewards a glyph and points players toward the next ones, guiding them all the way to the vault.
I also designed the vault door to display a sequence of glyphs that players must shoot in the correct order to open it.
To solve the problem of players ignoring trials, I proposed adding power-ups as rewards, each narratively tied to its symbol. For example, the potion glyph started granting health regeneration over time.
Because the cipher is the same for all players in a match, the system is inherently fair and balanced, which is crucial for PvP. In addition to raw power, collecting more glyphs also gives you information: you know what power-ups other players have, which creates a tactical advantage over teams that picked up fewer glyphs.
By doing this, the game mode widget, in addition to showing session progression and the vault cipher, effectively turned into a list of the player’s current power-ups.
The initial version shipped with 12 glyphs of varying power, so I introduced per-slot weights. For each of the five cipher positions, every glyph has its own weight. At match start, the game rolls the cipher slot by slot, using these weights to pick a glyph and removing already chosen ones from the pool.
In the release build, the system supported 22,320 unique ciphers. This ensured that each match felt slightly different depending on the rolled cipher, helping to make sessions more varied.
Later, we grew the system to 20+ unique glyphs, some of them match-defining. One of them, the Bird glyph, can only roll in the first slot and instantly reveals the vault, forcing early rotations, ambushes, and much more aggressive pacing.
In the end, a single system let me tie the fantasy together, fix trial rewards, and add a unique power-ups layer that keeps matches varied.
