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Single-Player Third-Person Action Adventure (X-Box 360 and PC)
The Chronos Project is a single-player third-person shooter that puts the player in the role of a 1950’s military science experiment with the ability to manipulate gravity. The player uses his gravity powers to escape the research facility before its destruction. Standing in the player’s way are hordes of robot security forces and a series of environmental hazards.
Position: Level Designer November 2008 – April 2009 (6 Months)
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Single-Player Third-Person Action Adventure (X-Box 360 and PC)
Lil’ Squirt is a single player, 2-D platformer game built in the TorqueX 2D Game Engine. The player’s main weapons are a pressure-based water gun and a laser chainsaw. The player’s movement mechanics are jumping, running, and dashing. Use all your abilities to blast and jump your way through the factory and the hordes of murderous robot toys to save your kidnapped parents.
Position: Producer and Level Designer November 2008 – April 2009 (6 Months)
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Primary Responsibilities:
- Drove design for the final boss fight level to use the game’s mechanics in a complex, entertaining way
- Scripted complex gameplay in a stable, easy to follow format
- Support other levels as requested by the Lead Level Designer
Above & Beyond:
- Designing and scripting the prototype level’s cinematic finale that resulted in the project’s green-light
{gallery id=chronos}workexperience/chronos{/gallery}
What I Did:
For The Chronos Project, I took on ownership of the final boss fight level, and worked with another designer and a programmer to build it. As the main level designer for the hangar, I pitched and drove the design for an encounter which was meant to use the new game mechanics in a cool, complex way. My biggest contributions were designing a thematically consistent encounter, designing complex gameplay, and tweaking the difficulty over several iterations.
Designed Within a Theme
When designing any level, I ask myself 1- What are the mechanics? 2- What is the setting? 3- What is awesome about them? For The Chronos Project, the answers were: 1- Flight and gravity pushing. 2- A military base overrun by robots. 3- Bombs, explosions, giant robots, and flying. After answering these, I decided to design the final boss fight in a military hangar so the player has access to a munition storage facility (Throwing bombs and making things explode!) with a giant open space (Flying!) big enough to fight The Eisenhower (Giant robot!)
Designed Complex Gameplay
For the Hangar level of The Chronos Project, I set out create gameplay that uses all the game’s mechanics. During the boss fight, the player has to use his flight ability to fly up to the second floor and fight through robots to flip a switch to temporarily deactivate the boss’ shields. The player then has to fly down to the hangar floor while dodging the Eisenhower’s howitzer cannon and missile volleys, position himself behind one of two munitions platforms on the first floor, and launch giant bombs at the Eisenhower while it’s shields are malfunctioning.
Iterated on the Design
I scripted my level in such a way that all the metrics were easily available at the click of a variable. This enabled me to iterate quickly and home in on the best metrics. On the flipside, some problems could not be solved through metric-tweaking such as that playtesters would sometimes spend too much time on the fight and have their health whittled away with no way to regenerate. I solved this particular problem by adding smaller robot spawn points in the level. Doing this allowed players to fight smaller robots and regain their health from the pickups they dropped. It was a simple solution, but it was effective, stable, and thematic.
Self-Critique
Were I to design this fight over again, I would take advantage of the flight mechanic much more. Giving the player the ability to fly anywhere in the game opens up the opportunity for multi-level construction which I could’ve taken more advantage of. I was happy with the bomb-throwing idea, so I would run with that, build a multi-level area, spawn bombs in random spots, cue the player when a bomb spawns, and make the player fly there within a certain time to throw it at the boss.