I was the first designer to arrive on the project, in 2016, and was tasked with laying its conceptual foundations. I worked with the creative director as a scribe, facilitator and sparring partner, clarifying what the game's high-level experience, pillars, and primary systems should be. I then liaised with the project's technical and production directors to help define what we should be building and how.

The role required flexibility, patience, receptiveness, and tact as well as creativity, so I drew a lot on Improvisational Theatre. Ultimately I would create a number of PowerPoint presentations to help onboard the other designers when, in 2017, they began to move onto the project from Endless Space 2. This documentation was still relevant for onboarding when more designers were brought onto the team in 2021.

I created prototypes for the game's cultural transition, cultural propagation, and tactical battle systems, all of which helped prove that our theories worked in practice. They also served to onboard and inspire new team members as they arrived: we notably used the tactical battle prototype to organise a studio-wide tournament, offering a bottle of champagne to the winner.

I used Inkscape to create the cards and other assets for the paper prototype, but this made iteration difficult: I now tend to use Nandeck for these kinds of prototypes. I wanted the battle prototype to be as frictionless as possible for other team members to access, so I wrote it using HTML and Javascript for the client. The game was hosted on our network on a Node.js server, using Socket.io for messaging. I still use HTML and Node.js to share prototypes, but now tend to bake them using Godot.

Responsabilities were divvied up when the bulk of the studio's design team arrived from Endless Space 2, and I took charge of the tactical battle, trade, diplomacy and cultural propagation systems. I notably ironed out what the game's 60 cultures and 128 military units should be, and how diplomatic grievances, wars, reinforcements, sieges, aerial battles, cruise missiles and amphibious assaults should work.

In practice this meant pitching various iterations and discussing them with the creative director and lead designer until we reached a consensus. I would then create and maintain technical specifications on Confluence, and would use Excel for rational content design: power curves and other such techniques were used to provide guidance when tuning the numeric data.

During my time as senior designer on the project I helped mentor several juniors, delegating content and AI design tasks. I took over as lead game designer in 2020, and managed a team of 8 designers through the Covid pandemic to release. This includes 4 who joined the team during my tenure and who I needed to onboard and train remotely.

Non-violent Communication proven a useful tool for navigating this period, as tensions ran high on all fronts. I tried to always delegate those tasks that were most in my area of expertise: this meant that I could provide clearer guidance and more detailed feedback, to help my people grow in the long run. It was a challenging time, but we released successfully and the feedback I received from my team was generally positive.