Mission Design
This page contains information specifically about my Mission Design related work.
(Unreleased)
Squadron 42
Squadron 42 is the single player cinematic experience counterpart and sister project to Star Citizen. It contains a mixture of FPS and Space Sim gameplay.
My involvement in the earlier days of the project, specific to mission design, included:
- Scripting mission flow & events with in-house visual scripting tools
- Pre-production prototyping of level & mission types
- Tools; working with technical directors & leads to ensure new mission & AI behaviour scripting tools provided the required functionality & viable workflows
- Mentoring; training and guiding designers in the use of in-house mission scripting tools and methodology
(WiiU Exclusive – Mar. 2013)
Lego City Undercover
Lego City Undercover is an open world Lego game, set within the Lego City toyline’s titular city. The gameplay is a mixture of 3rd person traversal, driving, simple melee combat, simple puzzles, and fixed camera sections (primarily for more involved platformer traversal sections, and most of the smaller standalone levels).
The game’s open world missions are punctuated with standalone levels, which can be revisited to access side content by using character abilities and unlocks which would not have been available when played as part of the critical path.
Critical Path Missions
As the first dedicated mission scripter on the project, I built the initial framework for most of the critical path open world missions in the game, handing some of them to other designers as they came onto the project, but working on others until release.
This involved:
- Objectives, hints, tutorials, map icon activation, mission start points, checkpoint saves, and video calls from mission givers
- NPC spawning, setup & scripting, including choreographing driving chase sequences, and melee combat sequences
- Interactable Props placement & entity setup needed for mission flow
- In-game camera pans and associated scripted events, including character pathing, environment and prop animations
- Using a custom tool to manage a hierarchy of mission scripts, with scripts “unlocked” and “finished” based on the tool’s progression variables
Scripts were a custom (loosely & simplified) C based language. Each script comprised of one or more states, with each state having both a conditions section and a flow section.
Conditions would run every tick, and were primarily used to change state, whilst the flow section was capable of running native function calls which took time before progressing the logic flow (e.g. playing animations, NPC pathing requests), while loops etc.
Scripting Support
Outside of the open world critical path missions, I also worked on:
- Side mission script templates used by other designers to populate the open world city (bonus missions & side content)
- Pre-production prototyping bonus missions and early versions of critical path / story missions
- Standalone Level scripting support, including scripted events, cutscenes, simple puzzles & combat sequences
- Setup & placement of more complex entities which needed scripting support
- e.g. train system (trains traveling around the map on tracks) and player fast travel via train stations, which also teleported trains
- open world state changes & progression unlocks which required script support & script unlock states to achieve
- Scripting & mission tools – working closely with programmers on language & tools development, providing example scripts, test cases, testing and feedback
Leadership
Whilst I am credited as the projects Lead Technical Designer, it would be more accurate to say I worked as the senior or principal mission scripter,
- Mentoring – training & guidance for designers and programmers with bespoke tools, scripting language and mission templates.
- Sanity checking and reviewing others’ work
- Onboarding and assisting new mission scripters
Critical Path - Open World Missions
Playthrough video (Note: this video does not belong to me)
The video (above) shows the game’s first critical path open world mission, one of fifteen chapters that I initially or fully implemented.
The mission contains a mixture of scripted NPCs, tutorials, open world tile-level setup, placed gameplay elements for progression via the scan mechanic, footprint detection mechanic, various camera pans, and an introduction to the game’s combat system.
Level layout and most of the interactable prop setups (those not required for level progression) viewed here were other designers’ work.
(Note: the scanning mechanic, and video calls are displayed on the WiiU controller’s screen, and thus only visible “on screen” in videos of the later PC, PS4, Switch & Xbox ports, which I did not work on).
Side Content - Open World Missions
Playthrough videos (Note: these videos do not belong to me)
The first 7 videos above & below each show an example of a side mission type, whose template mission scripts I wrote for other designers to use in their implementation of other instances around the open world city.
The final video shows examples of the scripted fast travel systems for ferries and trains, whose script manager I wrote, and train splines I laid across the open world map.
Playthrough videos (Note: these videos do not belong to me)
Standalone Level Support
Playthrough video (Note: this video does not belong to me)
- NPC behaviour for vignettes, combat encounters, and in-game cutscene behaviour
- Mission progression
- Puzzle elements which required script support