10 Hour Gears of War Level

Man, I love a good level design rush. When you’re in the zone creating a level, it’s a lot like playing a well-designed game: there’s tons of meaningful short-term tasks for you to do, each of which gets you closer to the greater goal of finishing the level. And you just find yourself doing “just one more thing” until it’s way past midnight. Monday night was one of those nights.

I found myself wanting to create a quick demo showcase of my level design abilities, and figured a little Gears of War level would fit the bill. “Just a quick demo.” When I started it was 7pm in the evening, and 10 hours later (8 that night, and another two in the morning) I had finished my first ever GoW level, showcased below.

Seeing how little time I had and how this was a showcase more than a fully fleshed out level, I decided to focus on one key attribute: “scenic vista”. I wanted to use a big, picturesque landscape as the backdrop, using all the skills and techniques I had acquired in my last few professional gigs; and I wanted to put a quaint (if that attribute exists in the GoW universe) mountain village on top of that. So I used all the tricks in my book to simulate and render out a nice-looking terrain (which ended up a 6700 tri static mesh with a 2k diffuse and normal map), which tiles 9 times to create the backdrop. The “city” itself is just a single road, and is heavily referenced from SP_Eba for quick turnaround. Throw in some atmospheric settings, cover nodes and enemies, and you have yourself a quick but pretty neat demo level.

This isn’t a complete map by a long shot, of course. More of a vignette, a small scene that describes the feel of the environment. The level is tiny, doesn’t fit into an overarching narrative and has no history. But I had a lot of fun assembling it, and in the process I reacquainted myself with UnrealEd (which I hadn’t used since the Unreal 2 days) and dug into the Gears of War asset library.

Now Playing: Batman – Arkham Asylum

I finished Batman: Arkham Asylum yesterday and really liked the experience from start to finish. Great job by developer Rocksteady! I went in expecting a Bioshock version of Batman, which might have slightly thrown off my enjoyment for the first couple of hours. But once I realized that this is actually a stealth game/brawler, and once most of the core mechanics had ramped up, I kept playing and playing. The best compliment I make is that it kept getting more interesting the further in I got, rather than less. New gadgets and little twists on combat and stealth kept everything fresh until the very end. The sense of character was outstanding in places – taking down 7 or 8 armed guys late in the game, with the Joker taunting his own guys in the background and the AIs playing more panicked voice lines for every guy who disappeared, made me feel like a 100% badass dark knight. “Fear me, I’m coming for you next, thug!” Brawling with all mechanics in place – which includes knife guys (need to be stunned before hit), stun baton guys (don’t attack from the front!) and weapons (don’t attack at all!) – was great as well. Once you start stringing together combo hits the action just flows beautifully, and the game puts a positive spin on blocking by using an appropriate counter mechanic, rather than the bland “I negated an attack but didn’t advance the action” standard. I never reached the 40 hit combo achievement, the best I could do is 28. But I certainly tried for it every time I went into combat! Very nicely done.

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IndyCar at Infineon Raceway 2009

This year marked the first time since its inception that Victoria and I didn’t get to go to the Indy Grand Prix of Sonoma. My brother’s wedding in Germany was a tad bit more important Through a DVR glitch (okay, I just forgot to set the recording) we didn’t get to see the telecast, either, but I dug up the final few laps on YouTube. And damn, this actually looked like a fun race! A year after a sleep-inducing pole -> victory lane routine by Helio Castroneves, this race actually had some drama and fun racing action! If you didn’t look towards the very front, that is… Dario Franchitti, uhm, won the race from the pole. Still, a step in the right direction, and a lot better than any Formula 1 racing I’ve seen recently. The “overtake button” adds some much needed action.

While we’re at it, here’s the web trailer I created for the raceway a few weeks before the event. Click to see the 720p version.

State of the Union

When I visited home last week, my dad (of all people) scoffed “Your page isn’t about anything but cars these days, is it?” Touché! There hasn’t really been a lot of content lately that didn’t revolve around Infineon Raceway, which is usually cheap content. You may have noticed some recent signs of life, but it’s been a while since I updated regularly. So I think a quick “state of the union” post might be a good idea. What’s up with me and the webpage?

The short answer is that life has been busy in the last few months. I don’t work for Factor 5 anymore, and I am taking some time to figure out what I want to do with my professional career for the next few years. That status puts me in a weird state; on the one hand, I have tons of time to do whatever I want to do, including blog posts. On the other hand, I’m busy figuring out Life, the Universe and Everything, which doesn’t leave much time for the webpage, at all.

But I want to get back into blogging soon. I’ve been thinking about a whole bunch of stuff, much of which would make for good web content. I’m a game designer at heart, and I want to make that topic the focus of this blog again. Hopefully, I’ll arrive at at least one actual posts per week on that subject, on top of a the recurring themes that were running earlier this year. Speaking of which, what’s up with…

• Beyond Belief 2008? Don’t remind me. The short answer is that the level is pretty much done, but hasn’t progressed much from the state that it was in for my beta test back in March. It still needs difficulty settings, a bunch of tweaks based on the testers’ feedback, and a complete VIS pass. Which takes roughly three days on a quad core pentium, a computer I don’t have access to right now. With everything else going on, I don’t see this being released anytime soon. But I do plan on releasing it! This level is getting comfortably close to “cannot finish something” territory, and I have never let that happen… In the meantime, I’ll send the beta version to anybody who would like to play. Just drop me a note!
• The monthly hike series? My knee happened. It’s been broken since I was 15, with recurring periods of bustedness in between. And almost 4 months ago, one of those periods started when I twisted the knee out of its socket while sleeping during the night. I pretty much wasn’t able to walk for 3+ months, let alone hike. So there haven’t been any hike posts. I did my first short hike after all this time just today, though, and as soon as I get back in shape enough Victoria and I will try to pick up the series.
• The Silent Reviews? Well, the page doesn’t look very attractive when it’s the only content appearing for several weeks, for one. And honestly, I was just running out of stuff to “review”. I’ll probably go back to the monthly snapshot posts instead.

I think that’s about it for now. Thanks for visiting, or still having me in your RSS reader! I’ll try to be more interesting again soon. Before I do that, I have at least one more racing post to get out my system, though