Home

Bionic Commando

Wanted

Terminator

QUAKE WARS

The Game

Bionic Commando for the Nintendo released in 1988 was a classic side scrolling platformer with a unique swing mechanic. The player was able to use his bionic arm to swing from platform to platform, there was also no jumping in the game so the player really had to rely on his skill to swing through the levels while fighting against enemies and finding equipment to progress through the game.

GRIN worked with Capcom to envision a modern day version of Bionic Commando that players had never really experienced before on the current generation of consoles, the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and the PC.

The Design

When I joined GRIN in July 2007 most of the main mechanics had already been quite well developed, there was only the prototype level at the time. There were lots of levels to be made and time doesn't last for ever, so there was work to be done.

The overall level progression had already been more or less planned out, the idea was recursive level design. The idea was that the player can adventure through a bunch of levels in somewhat controlled non-linear way and areas would be blocked off by large colored coded doors in to other new areas.

For the player to progress they had to find keys by defeating large bosses, then they can go back to where they found these large color coded doors and enter the new areas. Not only could they go in to the new areas but they could also explore and find secret areas that had these color coded doors. Rewarding the player for exploring.

After a few months of testing and building levels to fit the swing mechanic the level team finally cracked the nutshell and began to really make some fun to play levels, that really took advantage of the game style.

With a lot of discussions and back and forth hooing and harring with Capcom and the designers at GRIN they came to the conclusion that the level design was too complex and decided to drop the exploration type design in favor of a more accessible more or less linear approach to the level design.

By doing so the level progression was knocked around a bit to fit the new design choice, and most of the levels had to be remade to fit the new style and also to simplify the swinging within the levels.

Around January 2008 was when the levels started to really take shape adopting the new design choice. From then on it was late nights or all nighters and 2am Diablo 2 sessions with other level designers to break up the working hours.

Unfortunately I had to leave the project in March 2008 to begin helping the folks in Barcelona on Wanted

And then I moved on to Wanted. In between flying back and forth between the Stockholm and Barcelona office I would often sit there for a few days and write up documents giving the level designers feedback on their levels, further refining them.

The City and Flooded Levels

The work done in the City levels was mostly layout design, optimizing, creating place holder art, and some minor scripting while I was still on the project.

The work I did in the City area while I was on the project was the second level in the game, where the player had basically just gotten the bionic arm and was free to swing for the first time in an open area. The trick here was to guide the player through the environment while making it somewhat challenging but not too difficult. But most importantly was to create a nice consistent flowing movement from swing to swing, to create a nice swing an environment we basically setup each swing with multiple swing points which led to a platform where the player can stand on. Having platforms in between swings did a few things, it allowed the player to have a breather in between swinging, and allowed them to stop and look around the environment for any connecting swing paths to progress through the level.

The Fissure Levels

The Fissure content started when there was a bit of dead space between milestone deliveries. I approached the Creative Director and proposed to him the idea of starting the Fissure levels a few milestones earlier in a block out form while we had not much work at that current time. He agreed to my proposal to get Fissure started, so we began.

The first step was to create some content for the Fissure levels, as there was no existing content to use, so I mocked it up in Maya to use for the game. We organized a few level designers and assigned them a level from Fissure to block out while there was not much work going on, and in about a week or so we had blocked out levels with game play and progression.

My favorite Fissure level was the broken train station. I had a crazy vision of the earth opening up in the middle of an underground subway station, it would basically be ripped in half, opening up to the sky above, with busted up train carts and large side cliffs leading up to the sky.

I mocked up all the content needed to create a broken subway, somewhere around 20 models were made by myself to create the subway.

After the initial block out and quick game play test it was decided to be a level in the game. The concept artists took screen shots I had provided them and created paint overs for the artists to see the vision of what it would look like. After more play testing and refining in the level, the artists took the content and detailed it up to look really nice.

Originally because the fissure levels were mostly caves with very little sunlight leaking through in some areas, it was challenging to come up with ways to light the areas and guide the player through. We used things like fires caused by electrical equipment which had been mashed in to the ground from the above ground destruction and cars that had fallen through gaps with their head lights on to highlight areas where the player need to go.

Later on in the project another level designer finished the work on the train station, and put the final touches in there.