Dying Light: The Beast

September 2025

PC, Playstation 5, Xbox Series X/S

I worked on Dying Light: The Beast since its early conception.

Throughout the entire development cycle, I was involved as Designer and Feature Owner for several gameplay topics.

Alongside, I played a support role for other teams based on traversal knowledge acquired with Live Ops on Dying Light 2.

Encounters

Open world Encounters and Stages

Aside from the general Biters population, the open world in DLTB needed its challenges, opportunities, and “wow moments”. As feature owner for Open World Encounters and Stages, I collaborated with a small but highly talented team of Level Designers, Animators, and Programmers to bring this vision to life.

Our main goals were simple:

  1. Make the open world feel alive and player-centric
  2. Support the narrative in line with quest progression
  3. Encourage players to adapt their playstyle dynamically

At the core, we structured the system around four encounter types, guiding both design and logic:

  • Lootchest – locked containers guarded by enemies
  • Rescue – survivors to save, with freedom in how to approach
  • Flavour/Opportunity – narrative-rich or situational moments without a fixed objective
  • Target – specific enemies or threats to eliminate

A central philosophy I established was to keep encounters open-ended: players receive at most one clear goal, with multiple ways to achieve it. This encouraged self-expression and emergent outcomes, where players could creatively combine other gameplay systems (like luring infected with noise).

We delivered over 60 Encounters, which also shift with the day/night cycle: daytime often favors direct action, while at night stealth becomes essential (you know, Volatiles around wanting to play with you).

Systemic encounters come with a cost '⚆_⚆

Combat AIs

Screamer, Shooters, AI Perceptions

Aside from supporting other designers and teams on best AI practices within in-house scripts and logic, I worked on the following AI archetypes:

Screamer

Originally implemented as alarm turrets in DL2 to trigger chases, the Screamer lost its role once Volatiles returned to patrolling at night (back to DL1 roots). This led us to rethink whether the archetype should remain in DL: The Beast or not.

While prototyping OW population logic, I noticed some areas felt off with just more Biters, but worked perfectly for tension through negative space. This insight led to the Screamer redesign:

  • High-volume idle barks to build tension “huh, there’s a Screamer nearby!”
  • Perception reactiveness to force the stealth (or immediate player’s reaciton to silence the screamer)
  • A continuous scream that damages nearby players and generates noise
  • Noise that attracts Virals to the player’s position
  • Positive feedback loop: Scream > Noise > Virals

In short: the more the Screamer screams, the harder it is for players to prioritize it.

Thus making players feel fear when hearing again its barks in an empty forest or abandoned building.

Rifleman, Shotgunner, Marksman

The reintroduction of Firearms made such human archetypes essential for this next DL.

More conventional than the Screamer, I worked on research, behavior design, and tuning/balancing of them in collaboration with AI programmers and animators.

The goal was to make these shooters act as ranged support for melee AIs, forcing players to use the environment to break line of sight. Their reactiveness and accuracy are tuned to remain manageable to deal with, even without ranged weapons or tools.

Firearms

The programmers, animators, artists, and I brought into DL: The Beast all the knowledge we had gained while designing and implementing Firearms for Dying Light 2.

Some of the key improvements included:

  • Progressive recoil patterns to ensure accurate initial bursts while penalizing prolonged fire
  • More consistent and reliable fire spread patterns
  • Additive pushback animations to enhance the feel of automatic weapons
  • Refined and more detailed controller haptic feedback
  • Rework of hit reactions and side effects applied to AIs

On top of that, I worked on the design and implementation of new weapons, like:

  • Flamethrower
  • Grenade Launcher
  • Sawblade Launcher
  • Marsksman Rifle
  • Revolver
  • New Crossbows

Want to see them in detail? ༼ つ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ༽つ Here! 

New gameplay tools

A guilty pleasure of mine was to design, implement, and balance gameplay tools such as grenades, mines, flashbangs, molotovs, decoys, and throwing knives.

I focused on their usability, responsiveness, and affordances with both AI and the environment.

The goal was always to ensure they delivered meaningful and predictable results without ever becoming overpowered.

Controls layout & responsiveness

With the Firearms implementation in Dying Light 2, I felt the control scheme (and the responsiveness of certain gameplay actions) didn’t meet modern FPP games standards.

I prototyped a new controls setup and timeframes, which was later refined and adopted as the default one in DL: The Beast, and as the “Firearms alternative scheme” in DL2.

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Want to talk?

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