Level Designer
Neversoft
Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground introduced 3 classes of skaters, which meant bug-fixing and support for user-placed skateable geo (ramps, rails, ledges etc.) almost anywhere into the environment, and an “agro-push” (speed-up) mechanic.
Like American Wasteland, and Project 8; Proving Ground was an open-world streaming environment with no loading screens going from level-to-level, so it required lots of coordination with respective level designers and environment artists from connected areas to maximize efficiency and maintain user/skater flow between levels.
- Developed 2 levels from start to finish: Subway & Freedom Plaza
- Blocked out DC National Mall/Capitol and handed off to another Level Designer as schedules, priorities, and delegations changed
- Sat in every level review to give feedback to other level designers for the initial blockout phase of every level
- Worked with Mission Designers to incorporate captivating objectives to work with level layouts.
- Designed and managed before-and-after states of level geo for level events and player progression
- Designed transition areas between my levels and other designers
- Nav Mesh implementation and management
- Face flagging: Non collideable objects (foliage, flags, leaves, smaller objects etc), wallride flags for walls, vert flags for quarter pipes, physics objects, inserting invisible collision to cater to users and finesse accessibility
- Nodes: Grinds, Climbing, Ladders
- Glass shatters, breakable objects, gaps, doors opening/closing, teleports
1 song on the soundtrack (drum performance, arrangement)
- The Amelia Premiere – Disintegrate
Notable Skills and Software Used:
3dsmax, Pro Tools, Office & Outlook, Visual Slick Edit, Dev Track, Excel, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Video Capture, Havok
Levels
All were designed and developed in 3dsmax on XBox360. It’s difficult to get good screenshots on retail hardware, so I found the versions that were ported on Playstation 2 and Xbox with baked lighting.
Metro (XBOX 360/PS3)
While on the reference trip for Freedom Plaza, we used the Subway to get around the city and thought it would be great reference as the connecting tunnel between Washington DC and Baltimore.
We used Union Station’s exterior in the “Freedom Plaza” level. When you unlock and enter its doorways, it leads you into the Subway interior that connects to Baltimore.
Freedom Plaza (XBOX 360/PS3)
Went on a reference trip to Washington DC with a few artists, took hundreds of pictures of locations we wanted to include in the game. Mapped, blocked out, iterated into what we see here with the main focal point being “Freedom Plaza,” so the zone was renamed from “Monuments” to “Freedom Plaza.”
I blocked in the capitol, as it was meant to be part of a “Monuments” level, as well as the lincoln memorial and reflecting pool, but they ended up being part of a zone for another designer, so I included a couple screenshots of the capitol here.
Connecting zones were DC Mall, DC Metro, and Baltimore Bridge
Freedom Plaza (PS2 Port)
I didn’t work on this level directly, but I thought I would take screenshots of it to show what a reduced/optimized version of the level would look like.
These are screenshots of a level port that a member of the THUGPro community made with baked lighting and NPC’s.
DC National Mall (PS2 Port)
I ended up working on this level as Page 44 was short-handed, and I had to drop everything I was doing to fix bugs and integrate performance optimizations for a couple of weeks.
They had already done a majority of the lift by adding boundaries and optimizing it to run on older generation consoles, but were short-staffed when it came down to the wire.
These are screenshots of a level port that a member of the THUGPro community made with baked lighting and NPC’s.
