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.)
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.
