My Role: Production Designer

Skills Used:

• Level Design
• Systems Design
• Scripting
• Writing

This trailer conveys the gameplay, open world environments, and the writing’s humor style:

(YouTube, Written by Jay Lender & Micah Ian Wright)

Tools:

• LUA
• Maya
• Proprietary Locomotive Games editor

Genre:  Open World Shooter

Platforms:

• Wii

I designed & implemented roughly 25-35% of all the content, systems, and writing in this game. DAH: Big Willy Unleashed was a new entry into the Destroy All Humans franchise, so aside from the preexisting main characters and the UFO, everything was created from scratch.

Here are some of the features that I worked on:

• Open World: I designed this game’s open world spawning mechanics, which defined how pedestrians and vehicles would spawn & despawn at different alert levels. This gave the world the illusion of a large & complex open world, even with the memory constraints on the Wii.
• Combat/AI: Along with the project’s engineers, I worked to design an implement the enemy AI system. I then used this system to design & implement pedestrians, police, soldiers, tanks, etc.
• Physics: I tuned the Big Willy mech’s movement physics & attacks for fun gameplay, while still giving the impression of massive size. I also tuned similar settings for the UFO.
• Levels/Missions: Of the game’s 4 large open world maps, I designed two. I did the initial map mock-ups & grey-boxing, placed all spawning zones and destructibles, and implemented most of their missions.
• Creative Writing: I wrote much of the game’s dialogue, which had to conform to the DAH franchise’s comedy style. I was proficient with this style of writing, so I eventually ended up making editing passes over all the dialogue in this game.
• Documentation: My responsibilities included creation and upkeep of much of the game documentation. I wrote this game’s gameplay submission document for its submission into Nintendo’s console approval process.
• Wii Controls: I assisted in prototyping and iterating on controller schemes, to make the game playable on the Wii’s unique controls.