LEGENDS (Unpublished)
Xbox 360
After shipping Battle
for Middle Earth II in February 2006, I briefly joined the Medal of
Honor: Airborne team at EALA for several months before accepting an offer
to join Pandemic Studios in
This project, known internally as Legends, was a cover-based 3rd Person Shooter intended to fuse the gameplay mechanics of Battlefront, with the randomized dungeon and loot generation of Diablo, along with the quest structure and conventions of World of Warcraft. The project went through many evolutionary and streamlining phases but ultimately never coalesced, but you can get a sense of it’s intended tone, style, and gameplay by playing Borderlands from Gearbox Software, which is conceptually similar.
I served as a Lead Level Designer on this project, gaining experience with XSI Softimage to whitebox playspaces and prop geometry. I implemented level layouts and gameplay using a LUA-based visual scripting system and proprietary editing tools, and contributed to the fiction. I also wrote some quest system documentation, and I’ve included some unused pertinent Quest UI Mockups I created in Visio.
MERCENARIES 2: WORLD IN
FLAMES
Xbox 360, PS3, PC
I transferred onto the Mercenaries 2 team twice during my time at Pandemic Studios. During the first “surge” in 2007, I came onboard to assist the team with their push to alpha. They needed help populating the world with secondary content, so I implemented roughly 20 “Verify” type missions where you needed to either capture or kill and photograph various VIP’s or High Value Targets (HVT’s). There was a ton of empty space in the game world so I had free reign to alter the terrain and layout as I saw fit. I came up with some loose high-level fiction, implemented maps from top-down screengrabs, and defined objectives, gameplay beats, and lines of enemy resistance for these areas. In collaboration with a world builder we’d iterate on the layout for terrain and assets to support the fiction (buildings, props, vegetation). After receiving their first pass, I placed the AI’s and other gameplay elements (vehicles, weapons, pickups, etc…), implemented the basic mission scripting, and tweaked the layout through playtest and iteration. I’ve included a selection of conceptual maps to give you an idea of how the gameplay spaces were generated.
After returning back to Legends for nearly a year, I was once again called upon to assist the Mercs 2 team ship the final game in 2008. I inherited three main campaign missions in various states of completion, and my duties shifted towards polishing the gameplay layout, scripting, and debugging. I got a lot more exposure and hands-on experience with LUA and the gameplay script libraries during this time.
I’ve dug up a couple of YouTube videos of two of these missions for you to check out. Each mission is divided into two parts – check them out and enjoy!
“The Price of Gas” – Pt 1&2
“Get Solano” – Pt 1&2
MERCENARIES 2: BLOW IT
UP AGAIN – Urban Rampage
Xbox 360, PS3
After shipping Mercs 2, I transferred to their team permanently to assist with their post-release downloadable mission pack (DLC). We had a lot of creative freedom to come up with our own gameplay ideas and mission types, and somehow everyone seemed to gravitate towards vehicle-based scenarios. With Urban Rampage, I wanted to distill the fundamental player compulsions of Mercenaries (blow shit up and get money) into a more streamlined, arcade-like experience that maintained a sense of flow, urgency, and explored notions of “risk/reward” gameplay. I prototyped the conceptual design, game rules, and explored even deeper into the game’s LUA scripting libraries, implementing my own mechanics, object interactions, and setting up HUD/feedback elements.
Here is a YouTube video I found of the Urban Rampage mode in action.
“Urban Rampage"
I’ve also included a link to one of the LUA scripts I created for this mode.