Plague Inc: The Cure flips the classic Plague Inc formula on its head. Rather than spreading a disease, players take on the role of global health authorities racing to save humanity as one of several diseases threatens to wipe out civilisation. Initially planned as a scenario update, the project grew into the largest update in Plague Inc’s 15+ year history. The studio partnered with the World Health Organisation, giving them early access to builds and involving them in the design stages to help raise awareness of their COVID-19 efforts.

I joined for the latter half of development, working across a 4 month stint, with a focus on helping the team finalize and ship the DLC.

Contributions

Tutorial

I designed the tutorial mode, creating a wireframe prototype for rapid feedback and testing, then providing implementation support with a focus on polish, bugfixing and isolating the tutorial simulation from the rapidly changing core simulation logic.

Disease Types

I contributed to the design and implementation of the several disease types, particularly the special disease types; Nanovirus and Bioweapon. I focused on establishing unique characteristics for each disease, such as the apocalyptic mortality of the bioweapon paired with public panic and disorder, and heavy handed responses allowing the player to take decisive actions to clamp down on waves of deaths as the spread across continents. Or the hard to trace nanovirus which subtly sneaks through populations requiring heavy investment in advanced monitoring technology before the man-made malady begins to killswitch, ramping up lethality. For the first time in Plague inc, I introduced a tech lockout system, requiring players to make careful choices about the development of their response to the virus, with each critical decision they make locking them out of other paths.

PC Port

The PC port was handled by a third party. My focus was on the display of key visual elements that communicate game state to the player, supporting the porting team in matching these as closely as possible to their mobile counterparts, and ensuring that the gameplay difficulty and simulation remained consistent across all platforms.