David R. Lorentz

Archive for April, 2009

[This is the first entry in my "Incredible Hulk Diary" series, recalling my experience as a mission designer on "The Incredible Hulk" in 2008. For more information and links to the rest of the series, click here.]

Mission 1.1.3: The Enclave and Rick Jones – Part 3

Summary

What follows is a brief summary of the much longer essay that follows the jump. If you are in a reading mood, feel free to skip past this summary and jump right into the meat.

• Mission 1.1.3 is an escort mission in which Hulk protects a tank as it travels through a series of Enclave roadblocks.
• I took over this mission very late in the dev cycle, so I had no access to additional VO or tech.

When I received it, the mission was in very rough shape:

• The basic setup: Tank moves continuously forwards, with enemies spawning in random positions.
• This design created boring gameplay due to our AI and systems design–enemies would have trouble reaching and keeping up with the tank.
• Hazy mission objectives. The player had no idea what to do, whether to stay with the tank or hunt down the soldiers.
• Overall, no excitement, no challenge, and a lot of homogeneity.

My redesign centered on one core concept: breaking the mission into a series of constrained encounters with clear objectives.

• Instead of spawning randomly, all enemies are hand-placed at intersections, forming roadblocks.
• The tank comes to a stop at each roadblock, and does not move on until all enemies are defeated.
• The player is told explicitly to defeat all the enemies.
• The player is also told to bound ahead to the next roadblock as soon as the current roadblock is cleared.
• As a whole, these edits discretize the mission into a series of brawling scenarios (at roadblocks), interspersed with a series of locomotion scenarios (between roadblocks). This provides a basic heterogeneity to the mission flow, as well as establishing clear objectives and rewards for the player.

The mission played much better at this point, but monotony remained an issue. I did my best to maximize variety as follows:

• Varying the enemy types, numbers, and positioning at the different roadblocks (as much as I could).
• Adding a drop ship encounter in the middle of the mission. The drop ship is placed at the end of a long corridor down Broadway, which naturally draws the player’s eye to the surprising reveal.
• Adding several waves of enemies at the final encounter (after the tank has arrived at its safe house), to provide a longer, more challenging fight as a climax.

Reasons why this mission (and the game in general) thrived on carefully scripted encounters like these rather than more open-ended objectives:

• Unpolished systems due to the compressed dev cycle; rewarding gameplay could not be left to chance, and had to be carefully scripted.
• Basic gameplay in Hulk was a very focused brawler system without extraneous elements; there is rarely more than one way to accomplish a given task, so why confuse the player with vague objectives?
• The game’s target audience is the mainstream audience of the film, quite the opposite of core gamers. Thus, careful player direction was a priority.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year I worked as a mission designer at Edge of Reality in Austin, Texas, on “The Incredible Hulk,” a multiplatform title that came out with the Edward Norton movie. Things were incredibly rushed (as dictated by the immutable law of movie games), and I never got much of a chance to keep track of my designs and document them for posterity. I left the company when Hulk was completed, and totally overlooked the value of taking some dev screenshots or documents home with me–which would have been useful not just for my professional portfolio, but also as a way to remember that very busy, over-caffeinated, and tumultuous period in my life.

Therefore, in lieu of any physical documentation of my labors on Hulk (save the game itself), today I venture to document what I recall from some of the missions I designed and scripted–the things that worked, the things that failed, and my reasoning.

I don’t want to spend these posts griping about the shortcomings of the publisher or the developer; that would be easy and probably quite satisfying, but my intention for this series is to focus purely on design, as experienced by me personally. Target audience? Anyone interested in how design works on a major console video game, and/or how David R. Lorentz approaches scenario design.

I will pick several of the more interesting missions, create a unique post for each, and link to them here once they’re done.

Mission 1.1.3: Escorting a Tank
Mission 2.2.2: Escorting a Helicopter