Toys For Bob has had a long history, starting back in the Star Control days with Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford. I knew them from my first industry job at Big Ape when we shared office space with Paul and Fred. They both set an amazing example for how to lead, and taught me something incredibly important about teamwork - egos are one of the biggest detriment to creativity.
After Big Ape folded, Paul invited me to come join TFB as a level designer. Fun fact: TFB bought the scripting language that Big Ape created, and improved it for use in most of TFB’s projects over the next 15 years. As such, Paul knew I could start contributing immediately to the design team because of my familiarity with the toolset. TFB’s penchant for fun minigames was a good fit for me, I was able to spend my time on the two Madgascar games contributing to change-of-pace gameplay moments.
One of the big highlights was the Jeep Chase in Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa. It was the biggest contribution I had done for the company so far, and Activision loved it enough to make it the central piece of the game’s demo. I had a crash course (heh) in vehicle physics, and I was pleased with the level design - there’s a crossover piece that has barriers that spawn to block routes on each lap, sending the player around the same map but in the opposite direction to try to disguise that it’s a loop. It’s a stretch to suggest that our audience didn’t realize it wasn’t an endless chase across Africa, but I felt that approaching certain elements from the opposite direction would provide a different challenge.
Madagascar -
11:15 - Penguin Fishing (minigame)
14:45 - Melman Clean The Pen (tutorial minigame)
18:00 Marty's Escape level (Level layout)
38:50 NY Street Chase (vehicle movement, Gloria tutorial)
Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa -
2:02:10 - Fishing minigame
2:20:45 - Soda Can Mortar minigame
2:32:41 - Jeep Chase
2:50:25 - More Fishing!
3:33:30 - Copter minigame
Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam - built using Neversoft’s code and scripting language. We put it together in a very short amount of time after we wrapped Mad1 in anticipation of being a Wii launch title. It was built primarily to be an online racer, but word got to us late in the project that Nintendo wasn’t going to let third-party developers use the Wii online systems during the launch window, so we were forced to limit multiplayer to split-screen.
I was pleased with how well we were able to adapt and learn a new toolset and put together a solid if unremarkable racing game with plenty of action. I worked on the San Francisco and Chicago levels primarily.
Call of Duty: Warzone Pacific - After Crash 4, Activision decided to pull TFB off of a Crash 5 sequel and switch to a support role for Call of Duty. Our first project was to help out Raven on their WWII-based Warzone map.
Raven wanted a new tutorial themed for WWII, so we took elements from the original Verdansk tutorials and combined them into a single Warzone-centric set of instructions on how to be a good teammate. I created the layout and the sequence of events the player would encounter.
We were given a fairly small section of the Caldera map to work with, based on some brainstorming we went with a Lagoon motif that would have a recognizable high point (a Lighthouse) along with some memorable POIs. I did the main map layout using their Superterrain tools, and I also handled a recreation of the bridge from the popular Banzai map.
We also worked on the new Gulag area, inside a ship’s ‘Hold’. In addition to helping tune the map’s layout, I worked on a ‘secret’ way that players in the upper catwalks could trigger an escape route that would get them back into the game. A series of triggerable buttons would light up and if the player pressed them (or threw a rock at them) one at a time, a hatch would open up in an upstairs area and lead to a redeploy. The escape route was supposed to be added in a sneaky mid-season update, but was cut because our team was pulled to help out on another big deal: the Godzilla vs. Kong event.
I was the main designer for the Fast Travel system that arrived in Season 3, a way to activate a ‘rail cart’ to ride between underground bunkers.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III - TFB was tasked to help Sledgehammer Games to develop content for their Call of Duty title. The original plan was that in addition to a main CoD campaign, there would be several ‘open world’-style bonus missions unlocked along the way, and the TFB design team was to develop 6-8 of them. Sledge’s leadership was quite impressed with our initial 2 levels, eventually promoting them to the main campaign.
I became one of the go-to sources of information within the CoD team on some of the cinematic and voiceover tools that were being developed. I led the TFB level design team for the Precious Cargo, Oligarch, and Deep Cover missions.
Deep Cover was the MWIII level I was the primary designer for, essentially it was an unsuccessful labor of love. I wish I had a few more months to develop it further. It was supposed to have multiple sequences of stealthy takedowns in tight areas, including using CCTV to view patrol patterns of guards to find the right time to maneuver down tight corridors. A scope refactor meant that we had to reduce it to become more of a ‘playable cinematic experience’ to reduce the art and VFX asks.