When designing I find a picture is worth a thousand words, but a flow chart is far more useful to a programer.
Title: Principal Effects Artist / Senior System Designer
Besides the flesh hungry zombies, this game presented many ambitious challenges because of the time frame involved. Like the hungry undead, you never know what is lurking around the next design corner when you are running at full speed.
Over all we hit all the goals Activision laid out for us. It was an exciting bonus that I got to do the games PR as well because of the great job I did on Ghostbusters. |
AMC's Walking Dead
Company: Terminal Reality
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Design
Grapple Design
When creating systems I start by understanding what is the problem we
are solving for. With the grapple system in Walking Dead we wanted 3-5 Walkers
to be an absolute threat to the player, but until that came on line, it was a
very different game. There was a lot of concern as the game went from a cake walk
to a real fight almost overnight.
I wanted the grapple combat to be a complete mini game on its own and not simply a QTE. At one point it functioned so well we almost made it the only way Walkers could interact with the player. Unfortunately, time wouldn't allow for all the variation needed to make that a viable reality. |
A Quaint town...
When I was designing the quaint town
level with another designer I wanted to accomplish 3 things. First - a level
where the player has to avoid a horde instead of being able to confront it. Second
- find a new way to navigate a level by having to jump roof tops. And third - end a level with
an explosion. In the end, I got all three in.
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...With EXPLOSIONS!
Given we had very little time to
make this game, I gave myself a challenge to blowing up a gas station without
really putting the extra burden on the artist.
This is what I came up with. |
Weapon Design
I also tackled the game's weapon
design. Instead of going for the standard, this weapon is better than the next
typical power up structure - I crafted a system where each gun and melee weapon
was best suited for specific situations. The challenge here was that I had only
a small set of tweak-able values because of the short development time.
A lot of inspiration for the weapons I did for this game came from a couple of days at the gun range where I learned a lot about the differences of guns and how to shoot them. |
Example – There were 3 pistols in the game. The first was designed for the player that liked to run up and shoot a Walker at point blank. It was rubbish at range, but anything under 20 feet would hit its target.
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The next was the revolver. It had range, but the recital was greatly affected by rapid fire and moving. So you pretty much had to sit still to take an effective shot.
The last pistol preformed pretty much like a standard game pistol would, allowing for both close and medium range combat, but not being quite as effective as the other two at either. |