With input from my partner in crime: Keith Jensen, I put together several boards to show the intentions for the underlying forthcoming designs.Dead Rising 2 went on to sell about 3.5 million copies worldwide, which was more than twice what Dead Rising sold.Granted Dead Rising was an Xbox 360 only title, but that also paved the way for what would eventually take place with Dead Rising 3s development.The project started with team-wide brainstorm sessions to get a broad spectrum of ideas, and then downsized to the key development staff: Josh Bridge, Kevin Scherbey Annie Reid.
I worked with them to develop ideas for the story, missions and world content in the game with my focus being on world. From here, we each had to begin to focus on our own areas of development. It was also becoming a requirement - and lets face it - its fun to plow down Zombies with your car.and to have to face the problem of it being destroyed or running out of gas. This change in the focus of game play space meant my first order of business would be to determine a new set of metrics for driving. Since this was an afterthought with the simple driving experiences in DR2, it required an entirely new way of thinking. Everything from distance, turning, max vehicle speed, curb height, smack-able objects, garage doors, etc, etc, needed to be accounted for in the design. Beyond that, different roads needed to feel different to the Player, not only to better landmark locations, but also to provided different scenarios. For example, on the Freeway it felt wide and open, with plenty to explore should you end up there on foot. It ended up creating fast paced zombie mowing experiences, and holy sht moments, when you crash a vehicle and find yourself surrounded. In contrast, the alleyways were much tighter and provided a hectic driving experience that required smaller vehicles like the fork lift in South Almuda and Motorcycles in Ingleton. Being on-foot in the alleys allowed for creepy feelings, and situations of hopelessness with nowhere to go if you found yourself unprepared. Additionally, the player metrics for being on-foot also needed to be smoothed out, as the rigid animation of Chuck Greene was criticized by many reviews of DR2. The revision of these metrics and the inclusion of a new set of metrics for driving resulted in a chunk of pre-production devoted exclusively to making the players experience of world traversal a smooth one. I designed and with the help of Keith Jensen built several road networks over a 2km distance. I would quickly work out in 2d what the network would be, considering story, stores, mission and world content and keith and I would work together in Maya to block it all out. We reviewed every day amongst ourselves, checking timing of distances at speeds designated for gameplay, such as walking, running, driving slow, driving fast etc. I would quickly do it up in Photoshop or Illustrator, such as the image below. We applied those learnings to our world, to give each of the districts a different feeling to experience in a vehicle or on foot. American conquest divided nation steamWe knew early on that there would be at least 4 districts in the world, and each of these would require a majority set of specific weapons and vehicles to facilitate different play styles throughout the map.
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