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Wanted: Weapons of Fate is the official video game based on the movie Wanted. It was developed by GRIN along with Universal, it is set 5 hours after Wesley killed Sloan in the movie.The story is that Wesley is slowly becoming the super assassin like his father was, with his new mission to seek out the truth about his family's history and hunt down and kill the Immortal.

This title was created in the GRIN Barcelona office in Spain, the offices first major project.

I was sent to Barcelona for about 6-7 months to help the team down there with the technology and design, as things were a bit behind schedule.

The main game play feature used in Wanted is being able to curve bullets just like in the film. If an enemy is behind cover and you are unable to shoot him, you can curve a bullet which will go around or over the cover and hit the enemy, this allowed for some very cool situations in the game.

The other main feature in the game is the cover system, the system is just like your ordinary cover system where you press an action button to place the player in to cover, but with another feature called blind firing, which supported the cover system. Blind firing forces the enemies in to cover which allows the player to move around the covers undetected, so you are able to sneak up on the enemy and use melee attacks or simply shoot them from an exposed side.

The scenario for the first level is that Wesley is asleep on the couch and is woken up to noises from within his apartment, someone was going through his stuff up stairs, looking for something.

So the idea here is to really create the atmosphere of you were sure there was definitely someone there, but you couldn't see them until the cut scene, by using scripted events such as flashlights flashing over the walls in front of the player, and papers flying from above the balcony, it really gave off the impression that were was someone there.

Once the player had passed the first little introduction section which was there to get the player used to movement with the control pad, they were then presented with the enemies in the game outside.

The scenario here is that there is an enemy known as the SWAT leader and he stole something from your apartment and you need to get it back, so then the SWAT leader runs off and you chase him down through out the following apartment levels.

To beef up the start of the scenario I animated a place holder helicopter that came flying in with it's searchlight focused on Wesley throughout the first fight with basic enemies, when they died they helicopter would fly away.

Each time you would catch up with the SWAT leader it felt like the player had just cornered him, when the door behind him would explode providing him with an escape route, and enemies would come in to provide cover for his escape.

I mocked up the initial door exploding animation and worked with the FX guys to get the explosion working on the door.

The final apartment level where you fight against the SWAT leader takes place on an under construction rooftop. Initially when I worked on the level you would follow him down some stairs in to the arena, but after I had left GRIN Barcelona to work on Terminator they added in an extra little encounter before hand where you fought the SWAT leader for a small moment before the main battle.

I worked on the later half of the boss battle, sorting out the layout of the cover, and enemy encounters. I worked on mocking up the helicopter animation in this level, the helicopter basically hovered over the player providing light to make it easy to see the boss and fight against him.

I did a bit of work on the environment here and optimizing to make sure we got solid fps and memory reports for both the PS3 and Xbox 360

The 4th act starts off as you playing as Wesley's dad, in a flashback mission inside the cargo area of an airplane. In this level I helped refine the encounters, by nudging the cover and the enemies around to produce improved combat.

One of the main problems was the visibility of the level, you could see from one end of the plane to the other, so the first thing I did was add in occluders to certain areas and create little L shaped corridors to portal away from other sections. I adjusted the amount of lights in the scene as well, as it was killing the fill rate, therefore the FPS.

I optimized a lot of art content used by this level by slightly reducing the polygons and adding lod steps and trying to batch together models to reduce overall batch counts.

The combination of all the things above pushed the FPS right up to the 30FPS on the consoles.

In the second level of the 4th act the level has you playing as Wesley in the same assassin suite as his old man.

I did very minor work to the game play in this level, as it was already pretty solid, my sole job here was to get it running the Xbox 360 at around 30FPS to show at game shows.

The first thing I did straight away was analyze where the problems where in the level, the first thing I noticed straight away was the amount of objects being drawn at the same time, and the amount of lights used in the level was well over the recommended amount, it was destroying the fill rate.

When I inspected the art content, there was no lod steps on any models, and too many models used in the level, it was very much optimization time going on here.

First things first, I stripped out all the lights apart from a few to still have some basic light in the level. The next step was to figure out the best solution to fix the visibility problem of drawing all the models in almost every view.

First thing I did was completely separate the two halves of the plane and moved the lower and upper sections to separate sections of the map and portaled them off separately. Just by doing this I had already gained a few FPS, things were rolling in the right direction.

I then went through each half and created little L shape bends and add occluders/portals to each section to drastically improve the FPS again.

The next thing I did that really helped the FPS was go through almost all art assets and optimize them and batch all the smaller models together to create larger single models.

The 5th act has Wesley trying to chase down a guy known as Brummel, who has a tattoo of a map on his arm that Wesley needs to cut off for directions. I worked on all the scripting, game play, layout design and some optimization.

The first level here is the inside of an Office area, I worked with a team of artists in the Stockholm office who created the art content for the levels. I would get new models from the art team and test them in the levels and provide feedback on game play and technical related issues and they would go back and fix any feedback I gave them until the model was perfect for use in the level.

One thing we really wanted to do in this level was to expose the flanking idea to the player by using the cubicles to go around and shoot the enemies from the side or behind and catch them off guard.

The flanking idea worked really well, so we basically used it throughout the entire Office levels, but in fresh ways so it wasn't the same situation over and over again.

After killing the boss Brummel and you have cut off his arm for the map, an explosion happens and Wesley must escape the Office.

In the third map here we used the same theme from the first office level but with a lot of things on fire, explosions and people blowing up, sounds great!

Similar idea again, setting up flanking situations for the player with each situation a bit different to the previous to keep it somewhat fresh, but familiar so the player doesn't left out in the cold.