Jorge Gemas Herencia

HoOla! Quien quiere un masaje? ^^

Project overview

Hello, my name is Jorge Gemas Herencia, and I am one of the designers who has participated in the development and conceptualization of the video game “The Witcher: A bard’s tale”, created by the team of “Magical Muffin”.

My contribution to this video game has been varied, touching several sections, but the main field in which I have dedicated more time and more effort is undoubtedly the design in combat of the video game. This includes the design of the characters in relation to combat and the design of the enemies and the interaction between them.

Characters

One of the first tasks I was responsible to design was Yennefer, one of the two main characters, along with my teammate Gerard Clotet.

During the process, different points came out that we had to define as what combat style she would have, how she would attack, what her movements and particles would be, and what her strengths and weaknesses would be, although a very important point appeared that made us rethink everything: how was she going to differentiate himself from Geralt to make her special! Due to this problem that we found that we could not solve without knowing what Geralt would be like, we decided to help in the design of him, and once we elaborated the design of the character with his responsibles, we were able to finalize the general idea of Yennefer and how she was going to act and attack, at the same time from their combos. The result was a magic user who play with the enemies with area and ranged attacks, moving them from side to side, but at the cost of mobility in combat, so she could be put in danger if she played too much with them!

First version of the geralt and Yennefer combos

During later phases of the project, I also collaborated with those responsible for implementing Yennefer in the game, helping to select and put Yennefer's animations in all of their combos and adjust the timing and colliders of their attacks.

Yennefer continued to evolve and its implementation was being more precise and polished, following the bases that were established at the beginning, until the current version thanks to my teammates, while I changed to have other responsibilities that will be seen later.

Enemies

Almost parallel to Yennefer's design, I was also in charge of designing the game's enemies and boses, mainly with the collaboration of Alejandro París and Guillem Sánchez.

First, the mechanics and behavior of the enemies and bosses, both their attacks and their role, were designed in writing, trying to differentiate themselves from the rest and create dynamics that favor the combat.

Enemies designed with my collaboration.

During the implementation of these, some enemies varied the behavior or the role they had due to problems that appeared during the development of the project or impediments.

The last boss, Ciri, needed a redesign due to a change of plans, and both the changes of the enemies during the implementation of these and the redesign of Ciri, my role in the design of the enemies change, and was commissioned until the end, the person in charge of these, Alejandro París.

Mahakam

In the level design, I was involved in the level 2 design, The Mines of Mahakam, and their blokout. Although the responsibles and those who contributed the most to the design of this were Marc Doctor and Guillem Sánchez, I tried to contribute in a specific area of this level.

In the end, the level evolved and changed significantly, although the essence and idea of the level has continued to be maintained, and my role focused on another point of the project.

In the final stages of the project, I went back to levels to adjust the level that started from the Mahakam mines to become an extra level of wagons, which there was not enough time to have it perfect, and I put myself to help so much in correcting many errors of the wagon circuit and more precisely adjust the splines used to mark the path of the wagon and adjust it to the circuit.

My part from the initial blockout from Mahakam level and Wagon level with splines.

Audio

In relation to the acoustic part of the game, my role has been focused more on supervising and guiding the design of the SFX in relation to the combat section, helping to define and retouch the audios to later place it on Wwise and create the sound banks for code to put in the game.

In addition, I have been involved in finding, adapting and retouching several of the audios specifically of the characters and implementing them in Wwise, both in magic and actions of the characters such as the jump, the dash...

In relation to the code section on audio, I have helped in the implementation of the dialogue system commissioned by my teammate Marc Doctor, which is used throughout the levels to reproduce the dialogues about the characters and the narrator Jaskier.

Wwise player actions.

Magical Muffin