Days Gone

Sony Bend Studio, Playstation

Days Gone is a third-person single-player open world action-adventure RPG in a post-apocalyptic setting in which a biker gang member struggles to survive the wilds of Central Oregon now infested with the zombie-like “freakers” and the violent remains of human society.

QA Analyst: Design Liaison

I was present for some prototyping, the full production phase, and several months of polish. Bend Studio taught me a lot about the organization of AAA companies, and the values of iteration, playing the game, and managing the resources of the development team.

My presence early on while the team was still smaller allowed me to play a much more integrated role in development than most testers while the company grew to nearly twice its size. As such, My responsibilities included but were not limited to: creating test plans for long play-throughs, analyzing weapon and skill balancing issues, finding narrative discrepancies, training new QA team members and taking notes of their initial play experiences for the design team, reporting uncharacteristic jumps in game difficulty for progression balancing, maintaining a daily status report for non-open world missions, finding bugs, testing daily build stability, testing production build releases, and demonstrating new mechanics at meetings.

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Ain’t No Grave Demo

While at Bend Studio, I was able to take advantage of the game’s engine to produce a short narrative demo level based on the song Ain’t No Grave by Johnny Cash.

Though I was permitted to use the studio’s assets, which none of the other QA team had access to, I had to work on the project on my own time at the studio and had to learn most of our tools by asking for help from other developers as our tools documentation was usually sparse or outdated.