Extra Credit
Skylanders Level Builder
At some point during late 2013, Disney Infinity released, I bought a copy to see what the competition was up to. I was mostly underwhelmed, in large part because the level creation tools were a bit charmless and haphazard. It got me thinking about what a Skylanders level creator would look like. I remember it was a Friday, and I went home. And I thought about it all weekend.
On Monday I came in, there wasn’t a lot going on, so I asked our Portal guru some questions, I asked one of our enemy designers some more questions. I asked our art team a few questions. I found out some good things and some bad things, so I fired up the TFBTool and started experimenting.
I think two days later, I had something worth getting some initial feedback on. I pulled our enemy designer into one of the conference rooms and showed him a version playing on the big screen monitor, mainly to ask him what he’d do to create enemy encounters based on some standardized paradigms. Door was open, Paul Reiche walks past the door…then stops, peers in at the monitor and says, not quietly, “What’s THAT?!”
A long story short, they gave me several days to continue working on it and see if it’s something that they could put into Trap Team, which, at this point, was a few months before Alpha. As you might guess, forcing a new feature like this into a AAA title last-minute wasn’t in the cards. But I had high hopes that maybe it could be in a follow-up game, so I kept a copy of it to play on an X360 dev kit.
Here’s a video of it. (Sound quality isn’t great, sorry!)
0:55 - Level piece placement/orientation
2:25 - Enemy placements
4:35 - Adding Enemy Gate
6:40 - Toy interaction
Game Jam - Battlezone
I’ve always had a thing for vehicular combat, so when a Game Jam opportunity arose at TFB after Giants, I pitched a re-imagining of 1998’s Battlezone (action/RTS for PC) as a console-based vehicle shooter. In my head, since Activision published the game, maybe they’d be interested in a follow-up project.
We debated on re-branding it for Skylanders, but I thought we should just go for the original theming since it’s got so many classic recognizable elements. One of the things I changed was that instead of having Scavenger craft that crawled around the map looking for scrap, there were resource-rich points around the map that machines (‘vaporators’) collected the minerals needed for manufacture. Fighting over control of these points is what can turn the tide.
We had a week to come up with it, I led the team, came up with the scope, blocked out the level mesh, handled most of the scripting and UI. We had some artists who built the vehicle models and textured my level mesh, and a VFX artist made some mods to existing Skylanders effects for us. One of our sound guys took the sheet music of Iron Maiden’s ‘Fortunes of War’ and made a kick-ass soundtrack.
What you see here is a slightly more advanced version than what we showed on demo day, the Tank movement was a bit rough, and we couldn’t get the Turrets functioning within the spawn/movement/take orders system so they were just placed at each base. I also added the opening ‘demo mode’ after the fact.
Yes, it's on easy mode. I apparently can't effectively talk and play at the same time.
2:10 - Issuing orders to units
2:20 - Combat
5:10 - Hacking Vaporator
5:30 - Turret deployment
6:15 - Bulldog dropoff
8:45 - Squad commands
9:40 - Assault enemy base
(Had bad settings for audio input, so there's an echo in-game.)
Game Jam - Interstate ‘76
Another Game Jam vehicular excursion, this one to experiment mainly with a Loot Shooter weapon upgrading paradigm. I was originally going to set this up as space fighter combat, but somebody suggested I76 as one of their favorite games, and UE5 just came out with some decent vehicular physics, so off I went! The whole thing was done in about a week, primarily by me since the 2 engineers I was working with suddenly had to drop out to tackle a crunch-mode crisis for Crash Team Rumble.
The idea was pretty simple, shoot the guys, grab dropped weapons and upgrades, sell/repair/reload, rinse, repeat. I had the AI car movement done in a day, it worked surprisingly well. There’s all kinds of breakage points if you turned around and went the ‘wrong way’ or went off-road too far away from the highway, but every time I tried to tune the AI to be smarter they got worse at sticking to the road, so I opted to just stick to the game as an arcade-y shooter rather than have any sort of exploration.
Someday I’m going to make something that incorporates the hovertank combat of Battlezone with the weapon paradigms seen here in I76, add on-foot player movement for exploration and looting for a Tarkov/DMZ-style team-based futuristic extraction game. Stay tuned!
0:00 - Demo Mode
0:22 - Player Start
0:53 - First-person cam
1:45 - Lou’s Auto Shop (Buy/Sell/Upgrade)
2:00 - Weapon Upgrade/Mount
3:15 - EMP Jammer Rifle
3:50 - Missile Launcher
(Framerate capture was low, it’s actually running at a solid 45+FPS)
Other Shenanigans
Toys for Bob had a Halloween contest, I had an idea in my head, hilarity ensued.
Everything was fine…until I started getting into some 3d printing. Was able to use my small Prusa clone to make things like lettering and some simple detail pieces that I’d add to a PVC structure and foam board with other odds and ends.
So then I saw a 3d printer with a pretty giant printing volume and a moderately low price…and…an addiction was born.
