Resistance: Burning Skies
Senior Mission Designer - Nihilistic Software
December 2010 - December 2011
The missions that we created for Burning Skies were epic in scale. But that didn't stop us from building pretty complicated geometry and intense gameplay. The AI was tough so that we didn't have to spawn in too many at once. But they were pretty smart and took to cover. They also attempted to flank the player and so we built in numerous side passages to allow them or the player to move in for an end around.
Duties
Responsible for the last level and boss encounter of the game (6 total levels).
Supervised and mentored junior designer who had one of the 6 levels.
Ellis Island was a second level that I worked on that I inherited from a designer who left the company to pursue other opportunities. The LLD had worked a bit on the level but I took it over and reworked a lot of the encounters and fixed all the bugs during the Beta/post Beta periods. Here in this video, we have the first main encounter of the level on the docks of Ellis Island. Grunts in cover and snipers in the second floor windows provide multiple points of fire for the player to contend with.
In these next pair of encounters, the player deals with enemies hopping over a wall into a courtyard. A mini-boss caps the courtyard fight. Traversal up to the roof then ensues. The roof top fight also combines snipers and Grunts advancing in cover.
In this fight, a fairly straight forward cover encounter is presented to the player. I wanted to encourage the player to use a variety of weapons from the sniper to the chain gun given the spread of the Grunt and Advanced Hybrid positions and cover points.
This is the final fight with the Leviathan, studded with big Grey Tech Nodes that keep him alive. But as the player has no doubt surmised by this point, shooting and destroying a Grey Tech Node releases a huge explosion. But its only vulnerable during a certain time window. And because the Leviathan is moving around, shooting the Grey Tech Node is pretty tricky. I was tapped to finish the design and implement the Leviathan fight with only a month left in production.
We were already designing the fight with many mechanics. But since our engine with this game was so new, we soon realized that we needed to scrap almost all of the gameplay ideas we wanted to do. So I decided to keep the design of the fight as simple as possible. Where we used to have multiple arenas, we now had only one. I really wanted to keep at least 3 stages to work with and at least 2 different locations in the arena. And we achieved that. I worked closely with the animator and gameplay programmer to figure out and build all the components to each stage of the fight. I had to tweak the health of the pillars in stage one in order to give the player a finite set of cover. For stage 2, the player had a time limit as the Leviathan, over time, would destroy the two sections of the platform the player lands on and then with the next strike, the player would be smashed. Finally, the third stage is all about unloading everything the player’s got to make that final head shot kill. For the gameplay programmer, I needed to come up with all the rules for where and how the Leviathan would strike at the platforms. He needed rules for hitting the pillars before destruction and then after destruction of the pillars, where he could reach all the way to the back of the platform. The Leviathan also needed rules for how often he’d use his strikes, which ones, and they all had to be random. Finally, the Grey Tech Nodes needed to have the same mechanics as the smaller ones, but they needed to be tied into the Leviathan’s state and health. It was a challenging design process to get all of this ironed out in 1 month, but I believe we did a great job of it.
