Design work on Crusader Kings 3

On Crusader Kings 3, I worked as a Game Designer. The work cycle for game designers looked like this:

  • Create a design document.

  • Implement gameplay at systemic level using the in-house scripting language.

  • Populate that new system with narrative events to show reactivity to player interaction with that system.

Most of my work on Crusader Kings III was on the expansion The Royal Court. I have also worked on some fixes for The Northern Lords, and published some content in the 1.4 free patch.

Event chain design example

There is an event chain in 1.4 which I made that embodies a lot of what I’ve enjoyed doing on Crusader Kings III. In the 14th century ballad Richard Coer de Lyon, Richard the Lionheart is a boy-king, a child who commands all of his noblemen to attend a tournament in which he will fight them. No one wants to attend, for fear of hurting the young king.

‘Hym repented that he came there!’ – it is misery for everyone involved. They must watch as the child king starts slaughtering his own noblemen for sport, powerless to do anything.

This inspired me to make an event where you can facilitate your young child doing exactly that at a tournament:

A lot determines the outcome of the event – your child’s personality traits, their existing physical health state, your child’s martial prowess score, your knights’ loyalty relationship to you, your knight’s martial prowess score, and how good your knight force is overall.

Some immediate outcomes of demanding your knights don’t hold back…

But if you let the child fight a tournament rigged in their favor, things are much likelier to go wrong…

You can either choose to allow the child to participate in the tournament, but demand your knights don’t use their full force, or encourage the child to fight like any other combatant (or tell them off, but that’s less fun).

Game Over

I also wrote a system which provides grandiose epilogues for your character based on their achievements. In this update we wanted to add recognition of Major Decisions and kingdom restoration/formation. All of the major kingdoms you can form now have some exciting flourishes attached to a character’s epilogue. Above, Charlemagne wishes he could have done as you did.

At Paradox I worked with community streams and developer diary writing, and got the opportunity to add a couple of events into Victoria 3, too!

Before working on Crusader Kings III, I was briefly a designer on the Imperator Rome Marius update, which turned the game’s Metacritic score up by twenty points.