Star WArs Rogue Squadron
Level Designer - LUCASARTS
This project was my first full fledged level design assignment! I worked on 4 missions plus the bonus Deathstar Trench Run.
Duties
Responsible for designing and creating four levels with splines for all enemy/friendly ships.
Level construction included terrain definition through the use of gray-scale height maps.
Even though these were flying vehicles with simplified flight mechanics, we had to treat the missions as if they were ground missions. Nothing in space. So we needed to create ground features for the ships to fly along, in, and through. We used grayscale mapping to tell the terrain editor what elevation the ground features would be. This is how we created mountains, craters, and lakes.
In the mission above, there were 3 possible spawn points for the crashed ship. The player doesn't know in which direction until the level loads. Each time the player plays this mission, the Nonnah would be located in a different location. This meant that I had to recreate the entire level 3 times around each ship and trigger those actions specific to the location of the ship.
Of course that mean I simply had to copy paste the ship splines, triggers, and scripts... but there were no layering tools. So when it came time to copy the 2nd and 3rd sets of gameplay objects, I had to select them all by hand, rotate them, and hope I didn't miss anything. Which I, of course, did. When the level was finished, the entire editor screen was a spaghetti mess of splines!
Incidentally, the name Nonnah is the last name of one of the artists on the team spelled backwards. Buddy Hannon.
The Blockade on Chandrila mission was a basic escort mission. With all the twists and turns in the canyons and short draw distance, I could script in TIE Fighter ambushes along the path. But I also wanted to split the player's squadron to up the difficulty partway through the mission by creating a secondary target that needed protection.
Slow and plodding, the Y-Wing was like a flying tractor, chugging along the canyons in Kile II. But it carried a large number of heavy bombs so this mission was all about bombing specific targets and then taking out targets of opportunity. I threw in a dog fight with a TIE Fighter at the end for good measure.
I totally wanted to do a Deathstar Trench Run for this game. This was a fanboy dream come true! However, because our ground terrain could only be so big, one straight trench run was impossible. With no time left in development, the only solution was to make the trench run a 4 sided square. If players could forgive this technical drawback, the trench run was extremely fun to play!
