Level Designer
Neversoft
Project 8 is when Neversoft moved its primary development target from PS2 to XBOX360. A new direction with the Tony Hawk game to go from less “arcade-like” to more “skateboard sim” meant an entirely new physics engine and animation system.
Skater mechanics, physics and behaviors were constantly changing throughout development, so that meant rebuilding my first level many times to fit the new behaviors of the skater, and building levels with a completely broken skater at times.
- Developed 3 levels from start to finish: In School, Out School, Slums
- Blocked out Crete Park and the connecting area between Shops and In School
- 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
- Incorporated areas for user-adjusted geo
- 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
- Havok Collision system required us to use “Collision Primitives” to save on collision budget which required designers to create and maintain invisible collision geo separate from most visible objects in the level and use Havok’s Editor to view collideable surfaces.
- Each surface had to be tagged properly to initiate proper SFX/VFX with skater
- Nodes: Grinds, Climb
- Glass shatters, breakable objects, gaps, doors opening/closing, teleports
3 songs on the soundtrack (drum performance, arrangement)
- Aurelius – Hemlock
- Stasera – Palisades
- The Amelia Premiere – Disintegrate
Notable Skills and Software Used:
3dsmax, Pro Tools, Office & Outlook, Visual Slick Edit, Test Track, Dev Track, Excel, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Video Capture, Havok
Levels
Using 3dsmax on a proprietary engine, all levels had to be constructed and connect to other adjacent levels since it was an open-world, streaming environment.
Slums (XBOX360/PS3)
Main directive for the Slums is to serve as a run-down and darker counterpart to the suburbs/houses area (zone where the user starts the game). It needed to connect into both the Factory and Park levels, so I had to come up with level boundaries that would open (after-state) after the player unlocks those areas.
Reference was done online scouring pictures of run-down cities, downtown areas, graffiti buildings, factories etc.
School (XBOX360/PS3)
My main objective was to build a fun School level with a skateable exterior *and* interior. Up until this point, there have been at least 3 school levels in the series but none with skateable interior hallways.
School was amongst the first areas to be built, and the skater physics and mechanics changed a lot over the course of development, so I had to rebuild a lot of areas multiple times. It ended up being part of the trailer and shown at e3, so I had a very short window of time to work on it. I’m happy with the result, but with hindsight being 20/20, I would love to make plenty of changes:
High School (PS2 Port)
I didn’t work on this level directly, but I thought I would take screenshots of it to show how Shaba Games adapted this level to work on older generation consoles by adding boundaries, and what a reduced version of the level would look like.
