Classified: France ‘44
Classified: France '44, a historical turn-based tactics game, made by Absolutely Games and released on March 5th 2024. Taking charge of a team of Allied Commandos and French Resistance fighters, the player is tasked with leading them on sabotage missions behind enemy lines in occupied France during the run-up to D-Day. I worked on the game for almost three years, as both QA Lead and Level Designer.
Design Responsibilities
Taking ownership of content development for multiple missions for Classified: France 44, taking levels from pre-production to final polish, including the two levels highlighted below, crafting them based on the design pillars of the game and iterating upon feedback from the team as well as external partners.
Crafting gameplay scenarios to create exciting and engaging combat spaces based around ‘fix and flank’ tactics, that fit both the story requirements and the ludonarrative themes of the game.
Using custom visual scripting tools to implement objectives and script mission progression logic that accounted for all possible win and fail states that could occur during gameplay.
Drafting key mission dialogues and interactions to help deliver the narrative of Classified: France 44 as well as representing the authentic voices of the characters and the time period the game takes place in.
Writing Design documentation for key features such as Accessibility and User Generated Content to break down concepts and concisely condense relevant information for other developers outside the Design team.
Engaging with the Design team to refine game balance and establish a progression curve that was rewarding as well as providing a varied level of challenge to players of all skill types.
Collaborating with other stakeholders on the team in order to refine core gameplay features to meet the Design vision for Classified: France 44, allowing for a dynamic play style that would appeal to a diverse range of player types.
Though I iterated on many areas of the game during development, I was largely responsible for the following levels in the game:
Recce Birds
This mission tasks players to infiltrate a German airfield and destroy the enemy aircraft present as well as steal flight plan intel on upcoming Luftwaffe patrols and operations. The airfield map was designed to be quite open, with long and clear lines of sight for players to spot enemies early and give them opportunities to maintain stealth for an extended period. This was also supported by significant amounts of sparse cover that provided minimal protection from incoming fire but gave players many opportunities to evade enemy sight lines and flank them for stealth kills if they were patient and analysed enemy patrol movements.
The central set piece of the map was the central hanger holding a German bomber that had two interaction points on it that the player had to interact with to trigger an explosion cutscene that would alert enemy units to the player’s presence if they had managed to maintain stealth up until that point. The hanger itself was designed to be quite porous with multiple possible entry points, incentivising players to move through the map tactically and giving them multiple options for how they could set up for active conflict in an advantageous position that would allow them to push for the central objective effectively regardless of when combat broke out.
Lancet
This mission tasks players with infiltrating a German V2 production facility and eliminating the production unit constructing the weapons, reducing the German resources to build weapons of war as well as reducing the devastation on London. The production bunker is quite tight and has minimal inflection points from the spawn point, forcing players to consider their approach in the more open central area carefully and outflanking patrolling enemies to trigger combat from a strong position.
The central objective of the mission is the elimination of the production engineers scatted around the facility and the player is given a limited pool of stealth kills with which to complete this objective, signposting to them that their setup position will be vital as combat is inevitable and is supported by a secondary objective that requires the player to perform a certain number of melee kills, further incentivising a careful approach to the situation and picking their targets wisely. Once combat starts the player is also presented with a further secondary objective of completing the primary mission objective before enemy reinforcements that have been alerted to the presence of the player's squad that will arrive within a certain number of turns. This was done to ratchet up the tension of the mission further and pressuring players to take swift but measured action to ensure that the remaining enemy targets are eliminated swiftly as well as consider whether their current positioning is effective.
