Andrew Simpson

Worked on:

Hi there, I'm Drew! I have over 11 years of AAA industry experience, with expertise in
open world design, encounter design and systems design.I'm currently a Senior Game Designer on a multidisciplinary team at Guerrilla, developing an Online Project set in Horizon's Universe. Featuring a new cast of characters and a unique stylized look, friends will be able to explore the majestic wilds of Horizon together.

Rumor Conversations - NPC Encounter System

Designed and implemented Rumor Conversations, an NPC encounter system developed to drive player interest towards side quests and world activities.

Sheerside Mountains open world Design

I created the open world level design for the Sheerside Mountains region, in addition to contributing to early high-level and detailed design passes of The Daunt and No Man’s Land regions.Region design includes sculpting terrain and painting ecotopes, a detailed road network pass, adjustment of landmarks and sightlines, creation and placement of world dressing, distributing all machine habitats, fixed combat encounters and random scripted encounters, placing secrets, collectables and more!

Narrative & Scripted random Encounters

Led the design team ideation and pitching of 12 narrative-focused world encounters and dozens more random scripted encounters into production, implementing several throughout the map.

Rebel Outpost Combat & Level Design

Designed many combat encounter spaces from blockout to ship on world activities such as Rebel Outpost: Bonewhite Tear, while completing polish passes on both the Runner's Wild and Raintrace North outposts.Implementation work involved placement of all enemy NPCs, their pathing and scripted behavior, scene logic and difficulty balancing optimized through regular playtesting. It also included the placement of entities such as combat IOs, smart objects and stealth grass to ensure multiple approaches and a breadth of combat encounter gameplay were possible.

Machine Habitats - Combat Encounters

Maintained, scripted and balanced the encounter system responsible for populating and managing the composition of all enemy machine habitats in close collaboration with cross-disciplinary teams.

Relic Ruin Ornament Collectables

Developed the Holiday Ornament collectable found in Relic Ruins throughout the Forbidden West. Collaborated with quest design, conversations and cinematics teams to create the sequence network, conversations and quest conditions/scripting for Stemmur in the Errand Quest 'Nights of Lights'.I requested a new Decima visual node from Game Code that could detect the player's console date; with this I could script holiday visuals to activate automatically on their real world date. Players really loved this!

Greenshine Collectables

Implemented the Greenshine collectable design and corresponding scripting to connect them with the Quest job system. Designed the first-pass of Greenshine collectables throughout all regions in the map. Planned balance passes to tweak and improve their placement density and discoverability using playtest telemetry.