Level Designer
Neversoft

My most ambitious year where I made the leap from Tester to Designer.  I became familiar with 3dsmax and the level export & iteration process.  I retrieved old level asset files and converted them to work in the current engine, then built new areas to work with existing environments and learned common tropes, gotchas, and both work-flows and problems in the level design process.

Managing Classic levels taught me how to collaborate on the art-merge process and what kinds of problems could come from that, and how to be more efficient for future merges.

Leadership assigned me to the East LA level near the end of its block-out process, so it was my first time doing a level block-out.   Planning, communicating with environment artists, production, animation, VFX artists and other disciplines was constantly required throughout its development and iteration

By the end, I’d created classic mode goals for Chicago, Minneapolis, and Marseilles, and created Missions for East LA in Story Mode.

• Converted 6 existing (classic) THPS levels to work in current engine and made 10 classic mode goals for each:
  • Mall
  • Downtown Minneapolis
  • Chicago Skatepark (Windy City Slam)
  • Marseilles
  • San Francisco (cut)
  • New York (cut)
• Took over East LA midway through development
  • Designed and implemented all East LA objectives
• Level management, art merges, coordination with cutscene/animation team, managing nodeflags for proper progression states for geo and objects throughout levels
• 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, Climb, vehicle paths, NPC’s, nav mesh
• Glass shatters, breakable objects, gaps, teleports, classic mode goals
• Provided detailed feedback for every Level to each level designer throughout development.

1 song on the soundtrack (Drum performance, arrangement)

• An Endless Sporadic – Sun of Pearl

Notable Skills and Software Used:
3dsmax, Cool Edit Pro 2, Office & Outlook, Visual Slick Edit, Test Track, Dev Track, Excel, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Video Capture

Levels

East LA

Chicago Skatepark – Windy City Slam

Downtown Minneapolis