Ultima VI – The German Intro

There never was a German version of Ultima VI, and in my humble opinion it never really needed one. But sometime in the mid-90s, I felt compelled to create one anyway – probably because I liked computers (and Ultima!) a lot and had too much time on my hands I The result isn’t Earth-shattering prose, but I remember the effort fondly: German is famously longer than English (supposedly by approximately 30%), yet I couldn’t exceed the predefined character limit. And I was still in high school, and this translation actually applied some of the knowledge I had gained in class.

I had thought the translation long lost, rotting on a trashed hard drive somewhere in a German landfill – but as I was digging through my classic games folder today, I noticed two Ultima VI executables in the same directory and got curious. After some more digging, one .EXE turns out to be the one I hacked all those years ago.

This might interest me more than anybody else. But after the cut, for historic purposes, here’s the Ultima VI introduction – in German

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Dead Space 2 Release

Dead Space 2 was released just over a month ago! If I haven’t posted about the game yet it’s not because of a lack of love – I’m absolutely stoked with how the game turned out. I just got sucked into my new job at LucasArts and GDC talk preparations. I might post a more complete postmortem later, but for now I’ll leave you with the information that I was the senior level designer on the project and worked on chapters 2, 3 and 6. In other words, everything from the hospital to the church, and the mall/school spaces after the church. I hope you enjoyed the game!

Dead Space 2 Trailer

The latest and greatest trailer for Dead Space 2 has been released, hope you like it and will buy the game! It’s hands down the best title I’ve worked on so far. I did the level design for all those “Sprawl in chaos” sections shown in the video.

First Dead Space 2 Trailer

You can watch the high-res version of this video on the official Dead Space page.

Isaac Clarke, Patient File

Dead Space 2 Footage

Coming out of PAX East, here’s a small video of Dead Space 2 in action.

Kotaku has the full story with additional commentary.

With this said, I won’t get into the habit of writing about every little future Dead Space 2 snippet (non-official, no less) that makes it onto the internet. But since it’s the first moving footage of the game, and a scene from one of the levels that I’m working on (I don’t deserve credit for the implementation of this particular sequence, though), and I’m happy to link to it. Hope it gets your imagination going, and thinking about the possibilities.

New Wheel of Time Game

Red Eagle Games has partnered with Obsidian Entertainment to develop a new Wheel of Time game. Awesome! It’s a tough universe to do justice to (I think Glen and everybody at Legend did a good job, but we weren’t making an adventure/role-playing game at the author’s request). If I imagine developers like Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer working on the franchise, I get my hopes up!

The only worrying part is this quote:

We are not licensing our WOT development rights and stepping back from the process of building these video games. Quite to the contrary, Red Eagle Games will have an internal development team of its own. However, rather than staffing up a 200 person studio from scratch, we decided some time ago that for our first games it would be far more prudent to hire a small in-house team (e.g. positions such as Art Director, Game Designer, Story Writer, Software Architect, Quality Assurance Director, etc.) and rely on a third party developer to provide the majority of developers and their associated overhead and infrastructure.

No offense to Red Eagle Games (to be honest, I don’t know much about them – even after reading their executive bios), but Obsidian isn’t the kind of studio you hire to do the grunt implementation work, or try to impose creative decisions upon. I hope there will be a real exchange of ideas here, and the development effort will allow Obsidian to do what they do best: create great RPG experiences.

Dead Space 2

I already mentioned that I’m working on Dead Space 2 now, but failed to provide any detail. Luckily, magazines all over the world are now running their cover stories on the game! In America, GameInformer (sold at all Gamestops) has a great 10-page write-up of the game that you should check out.

This is the fourth game I have worked on to receive a major cover story. Pretty cool! But this is the best cover image by far, the art department at Visceral did a great job on this.

My New Job

Ever since Lair shipped in 2007, I’ve been waiting to post about the next big game I’d been working on. Unfortunately, game development doesn’t always work that way. When Factor 5 folded at the end of last year the process took my projects with it. And even though I worked on two games in 2009 there wasn’t anything to post about; one game is still unannounced, while the other one ultimately got canceled.

Which is why I’m all the happier to post about my new job, which I started working at a few months ago: I now work at Visceral Games (an Electronic Arts studio), as a Senior Level Designer on Dead Space 2. This was an interesting decision for me for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I hadn’t done professional, hands-on 3D shooter level design since Unreal 2 (which was in 2003!). But I very much liked the first game, like this game’s creative director, Wright Bagwell (in fact, I’ve known Wright via the internet since our Quake modding days in 96), and got a good feeling about the team when I visited for my interview. Add the fact that I’d never worked for a company bigger than 150 people (so joining Electronic Arts seemed like a good change of perspective), and that I still love making (although not necessarily finishing) 3D levels whenever possible, and this seemed like a great, logical decision.

So here I am, hoping to contribute to a great follow-up of a great game. I’ll post more about the job and the game as information becomes available. Obviously you won’t read any breaking news here that haven’t already been published officially by EA’s marketing team. But hopefully I’ll be able to point you to a few pieces of information you might otherwise have missed.

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.