Associate Producer, Level Designer, Game Designer
Elastiball is an Unreal Tournament III sports game complete mod. Two teams square off in an arena where they have to carry the Elastiball through a circular goal. The main mechanic of the game involves swinging around an intricately designed 3D space using an elastic grappling hook with set length constraints. Aside from creating and maintaining schedules and design documents, I also designed two goals (BSP, mesh population, Matinee) within the arena as the "Carousel" section.
Team Size - 8
Production Time - 8 weeks
Associate Lead, Lead Level Designer
The Galatea Effect is a 2D platformer that won "Best 2D Game" of the Guildhall's Winter 2008 Exhibition based on peer votes. With player-directed teleportation as the main mechanic, we approached the game from both a game and level design perspective by asking the question, "What would kill Mario?" The result was fun enemies and world obstacles such as electric beam traps and wave-like projectiles--jumping alone was rarely the solution to the game's puzzles. I concepted all three levels of the game and designed one while managing schedules, and creating and maintaining all levels of documentation. Please enjoy the trailer.
Team Size - 4
Production Time - 8 weeks
Technical Level Designer
- Devised complex methods of level streaming (not previously done for final team projects that the Guildhall) through meta-level design and Kismet for a technology-intensive game.
- Managing the development of highly complex streaming levels to maintain workflow of the level design team within common spaces.
- Concepted, documented, and whiteboxed the vertical slice level of the game, including redesigns as technological hurdles occur.
- Responsible for organizing, streaming, and building the game for each milestone.
- Concocted proof-of-concept and -technology levels and mechanics at various milestones using Kismet scripting.
Play Soldier! is a third person shooter complete modification of Unreal Tournament 3 where the player takes the role of a plastic army action figure that must fight his way through a boy's imaginary battlefield to save his comrade from the little boy's sister. The primary mechanic of the game involves destructible environments composed of Lego-like blocks.
I play several roles on the team. On a team with four level designers, the level I concepted and documented, "Landmarks", was chosen to be the vertical slice level. Aside from concepting, I also composed the whitebox version of that level.
My most important function of the team is as the "technical level designer." Because we do not have access to the native code, all the programming for the game is done through UnrealScript and makes destructible environments difficult to execute while maintaining a high framerate. Do to my previous experience with Kismet scripting and my understanding of Unreal 3 technology, I was tasked with a method of streaming together all the levels in the game and redesign "Landmarks" in a way that progressively streams in behind-the-scenes objects while maintaining the core gameplay experiences and visual quality. Aside from devising this method, I have also worked closely with the programmers and other level designers to optimize framerate and maintain workflow while we all work within the same spaces.
Previously in the project's development, I have also been responsible for using Kismet and UnrealEd3 to create proof of concept and gameplay demos.
Team Size - 16
Development Time - 16 weeks