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.

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.