Mar/082
Making of MP_Pipeline
The other day I finished up my second level for Gears of War entitled Pipeline. The download link is available on the level design page.
So when I started to make this level I thought it would be a neat idea to take iterative screen shots as I built the level from the ground up and talk about what I was thinking and planning toward the end result.
This level started the same as most levels I build, just messing around BSP cubes and building a basic shell of what I think would make for a good level layout. After a couple of hours of trying different designs I came up with this basic shell.
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If you notice in the top corner the level was actually entitled Caves, what I had in mind was to build a level that was underground with large opening looking up into the sky with some visible structures, sort of like a massive sinkhole. But then I remembered that the offical retail level MP_Goldrush is very similar to my idea so I decided to scrap the concept but use the shell to make something different.
After a little brainstorming I came up with the idea to make a factory that would be in the middle of nowhere, like the ocean. To add to that I decided to create the factory around a large rock formation, taken from the Caves idea I had before. Digging through the static mesh library and materials I built the basic idea of the level and textured the BSP shell and removed some extra brushes to create a more refined layout.
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With the level now textured it was time to start adding some static meshes for more detailing. Now there are lot of different static meshes to choose from and some seem to fit together than others for a factory theme. So what I like to do normally with most of my level design is to create a ‘junkyard’ near the level and just place a whole bunch of meshes that I think look cool and could possibly work.
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In the image above that is just a handful of the many meshes that I eventually added to the ‘junkyard’.
With the junkyard pretty much full of good meshes I started to play around with them and see how the looked on different sections of the level. After a while I found the right pieces and eventually the level started to take shape.
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After a week of working on the level I got all the details that I wanted to make the level feel like a factory, a total of 1936 static meshes to be exact. I felt like this phase was done and moved on to lighting.
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One of my many favorite levels in the game is Tyro Station, not only is the game play fun in that level but the environment with the red haze looks awesome. With that inspiration I decided to make a similar post process effect on the level
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I also added some directional lights to change the color to be a little more brigher than dark red as well as global spot light as the direction from where main light source was coming from. The spotlight also helped with some nice glare/refelections off some of the more metallic looking meshes in the level.
From here I added all the cover spots, play tested the level and got some good feedback for subtle improvements. So I went back and added some more details to the level, and started to give it a more run down look by purposely mis aligning floor tiles, adding broken support beams, trash, blood stains, and a few dead bodies out on the rocks outside the main playing space. In the end the static mesh count went up to 2453!
Here is the end product of the level fully textured, detailed, and lit.
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As well the final BSP wire frame
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And final mesh wireframe, looks cluttered but really is not.
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For more in game screens check out the level design page to the right. Hopefully you guys will enjoy the level and as usual comments and feedback is welcomed along with any questions that you may have from reading this.
Cheers!
Feb/082
Best Week Ever
Got back from GDC yesterday afternoon, but was so tired from the past week and from the lack of sleep I had on the red eye flight back that I slept all day. Now that I am awake I thought I share what went on last week.
Monday:
I spent most of the day at the Indpendent Games Summit, though I did plan to go the Game Design Workshop, but given that the workshop was a two day commitment for all day Monday and Tuesday I decided that the Indie game was a better choice so that I could do something different for Tueday. Actually the Indie games was a two day event as well but since it was a series of mini postmortems there was no need to attend both days.
Anyways the Indie Game Summit was quite informative to see and hear some of the problems and solutions Indie game developers face while making and distributing their games. Some of the stuff they talked about are similar in nature to things that established dev houses face when creating their games. The best session of day was from folks at Introversion Sotware, creators of Darwinia and Defcon. Their session was basically about establishing a brand and supporting it by working with consumers and listening to their needs and using their feedback to make great games.
I skipped out on the last few sessions becuase I was feeling a bit sleepy so instead of falling a sleep during someone’s session I decided to head back to the hotel. A few hours later I met up with the other VV folks that came down to GDC and headed out to dinner. We planned to go to some Thai resturant near by but on the way there we bumped into Jamil Moledina, the head honcho of GDC! Our little group chatted with him for a bit on the way to resturant, then he asked us where we were headed. We told him to a Thai resturant, Jamil told us to go to a different one called Osha, that was closer. We took his advice and damn was that place good.
Tuesday:
Again another day long session, Creativity Boot Camp. Bascially in nutshell this session was about creativity. There were a bunch of fun little exercises that involved different facets of creativity such as problem solving, concept drawing, working within time constraints, etc. Then all of these concepts were applied at the end to creating a game using a particular game board and set pieces. Each group gave a one minute pitch and quick demo of their game to other session attendees.
That night was the IGDA party, met some old friends from last year and made some new ones as well. Also at the party I met up with level designer friend Tynan Sylvester, (check out his blog link on the right side).
Wednesday:
Started out the day by heading down to Ken Levine’s talk on storytelling in Bioshock. Very cool talk, full of spoilers about the game but I assume for the most part everyone in the crowd had already played the game. Before the talk I went up to Ken and introduced myself and asked him, “Would you kindly, sign my copy of Bioshock.” For those that have played the game the phrasing of the question will make sense out side of being nice. Ken did sign my copy of Bioshock, very cool.
After Bioshock talk I went to a round table session entitled, Designing Conflict without Combat, quite interesting to hear peoples thoughts and ideas about the subject. But in the end it seemed at least within the context of video games most conflict in the end is resolved with combat in some form or another.
The Microsoft Keynote was on this day as well, and the two cool things out of it, Gears of War 2 and the XNA games info.
Took the rest of the day off to perpare for my own talk with Leo on Spider-Man 3. Finally at 4:00 PM we started our talk. The crowd turnout was good, half the hall was full and got some great questions at the end of the talk so overall I think it went well. Also Craig Harris from IGN was at the talk as well, he usually comes down to VV to review our DS games, nice to meet up with again at our talk. Cool thing was that after the talk at the booth crawl and last two days at GDC people kept coming up to me saying they were at the talk and really enjoyed it. I am sure Leo had the same experience after the talk.
Thursday:
Headed to the talk from some Lucas Arts folks about their new game, Star Wars: Force Unleashed. If you have not heard or seen previews of this game then check out this link full of videos down at IGN. At the end of their talk they gave out some cool swag from the game that included some mini action figures and vehicle model.
The annual Game Design Challenge was a lot fun, last year’s winner Alexey Pajitnov had to face off against challengers, Steve Meretzky and Brenda Brathwhite. The topic of this year’s challenge was the inter-spieces game, which had to be game that could be played by both humans and another worldy speices. Alexey had some crazy design that invloved people playing a game of virtual paintball with dolphins, Steve had an RTS game played against bacteria, and Brenda proposed a social networking game with dogs. In the end Steve’s concept entitled Bac Attack won.
That night I went to two parties, the first was the Level 99 party for GDC speakers. Met some fellow speakers and had a good time there. After an hour or so I headed to Microsoft party which was really good. They had this really cool live band not sure what their name was but they played some sort of jazz/funk music great stuff. There were couple of games setup around the party such as Call of Duty 4 and Crysis. Met quite a few people just from playing a couple of rounds of CoD 4.
Friday:
The final day of GDC, I spent most of my morning at the Activision booth in career pavillion, answering questions of people interested in gaming jobs and played Guitar Hero 3 with some people down at the booth.
Soon afterwards I went to the annual Game Designers Rant, which is where a few designers get up on stage and rant about what is bothering them about the games industry. Following that I headed down to the Unreal Tournament 3 postmortem, presented by Mike Capps and Jeff Morris. Very cool and informative session on the behind the scenes of the development of UT 3. At some point during the session Jeff said his famous quote of “Carnage, Carnage, Carnage!” At the end of the session I got the two to sign my copy of the UT 3 art book.
After that I headed out to the airport for my long red eye flight back home.
Feb/080
Off to GDC 08
My flight is in a few hours, just finished some last second packing. Really looking forward to going this year, not only for my own presentation, but the current line up of talks are great. Some of the presentations I’ll try attend discuss the games, Bioshock, Unreal Tournament 3, and Portal.
And like last year I’ll have a lot of notes and information to share once I return. Hopefully this trip will go well, becuase so far I have had a bad start this morning with some serious plumbing issues in my apartment, which resulted in an overflowing toilet…not cool.
Jan/080
Review of Reviewers
Had nothing to write about for the last few weeks, but now I do, my topic…movie reviews. They suck, sometimes they portray an accurate picture of what to expect but sometimes it’s a load of bull shit. People have their own expecations and for the most part are not in line with those of reviewers that get paid. I personally perfer a friend to tell me if movie is awesome or sucks, but somtimes you can tell just by the preview. I say sometimes… as the quote goes, “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”.
For example, recently I saw There Will Be Borderm… sorry Blood. Previews looked intersting, title sounded cool, good reviews. Personally I did not want to watch it, wanted to see Cloverfield, but a buddy of mine already saw it so got dragged into the other one. Anyways, long story short, that movie was boring, too me. Not to say it was not interesting it had it’s moments but damn was it long and not what I expected. From what I heard and previews I saw, it seemed to be a psuedo-ganster type film, love those types of movies, where the main character would be total bad ass to get what he wants. Well it was there in this film but the way it was done was so slow and drawn out that I lost interest. And there was no blood till the end. Funny thing one my other friends started to snore during the film so that was a sure sign of it’s bore factor.
Now take the new Rambo. You already know what to expect given the last three iterations, part two was the best in my opinion. However the review scores are low, my thinking is reviewers are a bunch of old farts that look at movies with a ‘technical eye’ rather than just the fun factor of it. Of course Rambo has no story, well maybe some basic premise, but the gist is people die left and right and shit blows up. And it’s fun, hell you even laugh at times at how cheesy somethings can be. As I said I kind of knew what to expect, I know this is not going to be one of those movies that supposed move you in some way or be made to win awards like the other one, There Will Be Blood, but sometimes senseless movies are cool and great way to just forget about things and spend two hours having a blast than thinking about characters and detailed story. Of course each person is entitled to enjoy the films they like and walk away from others that are not their cup of tea, but slamming poor reviews on a fun movie like Rambo was just a cheap shot from critcs, I say. There were some decent well rounded reviews discussing good and bad points, but still more focus on the bad.
Oh well, it seems reviewer opinions seem to drive most movie goers to certain films and get paid for their comments good or bad, but honestly lack the value of hearing how something was first hand from a reliable source like a friend. Then again there are contradictions to that statement, take the 300 spoof that is out now, low ratings, like 3% from reviewers, and still people watched it and made it the best box office movie for this week! Now a movie like that is not my cup of tea, but I can see how some probably watched it for the hell of it to have fun, no matter what people say about it.
So again movie reviews suck, just watch stuff on your own gut feeling of it being good or bad, or take the safe route and ask someone how it was, or save your wallet ten bucks and wait for the DVD and not regert wasting money on a movie that people said rocked, but sucked for you.
Jan/080
First Gears Map Done…
Well I never did get a lot of response about this map from the forums, a lot of views and a few comments here and there. Hopefully people that have stopped by on the forums have checked out the map in some state or another, but now the final release is out. Stop by the level design page to check out the screens and download the map. Once you do download it follow the install directions in the readme file if you put the map file anywhere else it won’t work… not a big fan of the whole My Documents file structure either but not much can be done about that.
As usual feel free to leave any comments about the map. Done some minor tweaks here and there but don’t think there is a lot more I can do with this map so now it’s out into the wild… enjoy.