Tag Archive - design

Making of Guns of Stygia (Pt.3)

May 11, 2011 in Bulletstorm with 2 Comments

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This is the 3rd in a series of posts about the making of my Guns of Stygia map that’s available in the Gun Sonata DLC pack, and it’s brought to you by the letter G.

I’m not sure why, really – it just happened like that. I started writing about level design stuff and ended up talking about Goals, Gating and Good Ideas. More specifically, it’s about how one small idea can prove valuable, by helping a level designer achieve many different goals at once. If you’re interested in level design, then read on!

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Making of Guns of Stygia (Pt.2)

April 20, 2011 in Bulletstorm with 4 Comments

What do you mean overcompensating?

In this second post about the development of Guns of Stygia DLC map I will try to give you an insight in to the process of lighting the worlds you kick ass in.

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Making of Guns of Stygia (Pt.1)

April 13, 2011 in Bulletstorm with 9 Comments

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Finally, you’re able to get your hands on our first DLC for Bulletstorm – the Gun Sonata pack. Hooray!

It includes 5 new maps, one of which is a brand new Echo map called Guns of Stygia, that I was the level designer on. We thought we could take this opportunity to give a little insight into the creative process, so this is going to be a bit of a super mega special article written in different parts.

This first one from me is going to be an overview of the kind of thinking behind a level that goes on in the early stages. Tomas will follow this up with a post from his perspective as a lighting artist, and later I’ll come back to go into nitty-gritty level design stuff in more detail and, and… well, it’ll be so amazing it might just change your life*.

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What’s a Man Toast?

April 4, 2011 in Bulletstorm with 6 Comments

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One of my responsibilities during the development of Bulletstorm was managing the names for the Skillshots. Not to say that I came up with them all, because I didn’t. Everyone helped out and each idea was crazier than the next, but I hold great pride in one of the Skillshots I named – The MAN TOAST.

Do you even know what that is?

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We killed the clowns

March 21, 2011 in Bulletstorm with 9 Comments

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We had a great feature in the game once. I absolutely loved it.

Laughing porcelain Clowns.

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Life of a Level Designer (Pt.1)

March 17, 2011 in Bulletstorm with 42 Comments

This is how it looks behind the scenes.

When somebody asks me what I do, I try to explain it in a few simple sentences. “I design levels, I place walls, enemies etc”. In return I usually hear “Wow! That’s a great job, you are playing for a whole day and you get paid for it“. Ehhh… both statements don’t represent how it really is.

It’s easy to imagine that making a level is a piece of cake. What’s difficult about putting in a few walls, placing some enemies, adding dialogues, cutscenes or an event like a dragon riding a sledge? A day’s work and tadam! I’m drinking beer, playing my super mega marvelous level, delighted how it came out, knowing players will be exited when they play it. Honestly, it’s a shame that this couldn’t be further from the truth…

Don’t get me wrong. I love my job and I don’t see myself anywhere else, but I assure you it’s no picnic and nothing like you imagine. You want to know why? Read on.

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Question Everything

February 28, 2011 in Bulletstorm with 46 Comments

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Fat alone can’t make you fat. You can shoot through bulletproof glass. And you cannot fail a QTE in Bulletstorm. WAIT, WHAT?

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Design By Tweaking

January 28, 2011 in Bulletstorm with 20 Comments

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As a game designer, sometimes you have an awesome idea, you manage to get the idea approved, someone creates a feature and it all works beautifully. But very often, the path to gameplay goodness can be more like Internet Dating – things usually don’t turn out how you expect, and you have to try a million different options before you get what you’re after.

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How to make an army out of one bald dude

January 17, 2011 in Bulletstorm with 55 Comments

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How many games have you played when every enemy looks the bloody same? Remember the old side scrolling beat-em-ups? It was like killing angry Bob and his entire gigantic family of dumb identical twin brothers and all their identical friends who also shopped at the same clothing store.

But there’s a reason for that, and it’s called memory space. It haunted us then and it still haunts us now. So how did we go about solving this problem in Bulletstorm? We created an entire army using one bald dude.

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We had to use Red Barrels

January 3, 2011 in Bulletstorm with 34 Comments

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We’re trying really hard to make an awesome and innovative game with Bulletstorm. There’s no shooter out there like it and I want to discuss the process of one of our most ground breaking features:

Exploding Red Barrels

I know, I know, it sounds craaaazy! However, tests have shown that they work and people “get the idea”. You shoot them, and they go boom! In fact, at first we tried something else…

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