ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Paper Design, layout and development of:
- 'The Seer, The Trickster, And The Brute'
- 'Waking Giants'
- 'In the Company of Friends'
- 'A Clash of Leviathans'
- Worked with Environment Artists on beautification passes
- Attended playtest sessions to collaborate on feedback
- Ensured required narrative beats were implemented
- Worked with Animation Team to implement bookend Non-Interactive-Sequence cutscenes
- Worked with Lead Animator to implement Storyboarded sequences for 'Waking Giants' and 'In the Company of Friends'
- Developed and implemeneted NIS sequence showcasing Wazmakka's Gorkanaut in 'A Clash of Leviathans' with feedback from Lead Animator
- Filtered feedback and implemented changes
- Worked closely with Core Design to ensure game mechanics from multiplayer were respected in single player
The Seer, The Trickster, And The Brute
I loved this mission - the task is fairly simple on paper: Destroy Ork Structures to get the attention of the Warboss and parlay with him.
However, the mission takes place on these weird construct floating islands made out of cubes stitched together in an Escher style surrealist landscape. And the Warboss has a tractor beam that can pull asteroids down on you and will.
The mission flow goes as follows: Arrive on an island, build your forces, kill all the Orks and then Warboss Gorgutz gets upset and starts to rain asteroids on you. Being the Eldar, your buildings can relocate, so you have to quickly relocate your buildings and forces to another island before the old one is destroyed.
So you hop from island to island, wrecking ork stuff until finally coming face to face with Gorgutz and hopefully he doesn't take this all too personally.
Narratively, we explore how willing the Eldar are to use Orks as tools - and how normally orks are too dumb to realize it, but Gorgutz is a bit smarter than your average ork.
Waking Giants
This mission is a bit of a departure for gameplay. It starts out as a meeting between Ronahn and Taldeer (The two 'good' Eldar) but quickly descends into the flashpoint for an Eldar civil war as Kyre (the 'bad' Eldar) is basically being corrupted by Chaos without even knowing it. Exhibit A: The giant demon under the ice.
The player attemps to escape Kyre's ambush, but of course is unable to. Kyre has setup some disruptors that lock out the Eldar Webway gate, not only preventing the player from leaving, but also from bringing in reinforcements. All they have are the two elites and some troops. They have to destroy the disruptors in order to unlock the webway and escape.
Luckily, scattered around the map are a couple prisons containing additional Eldar who will fight for you if you free them, and we have some hiding in stealth cover who will come to join if you get close enough.
As the player destroys each disruptor, they reveal the remains of Wraithknights - giant Eldar walkers. However, they seem to be too far gone to be of use. That is, until, the second disruptor is blown up - revealing an intact one.
This shifts the mission to a wave defense as the player needs to power up the Wraithknight. Doing so allows them to take control of this super-heavy, destroy the final disruptor and escape before Kyre and blow up the webway gate.
Narratively we setup the reveal that Kyre, who is acting out of what he thinks are the best interest of the Eldar, is in fact (SURPRISE!) corrupted by Chaos and using him to free the demon.
In the Company of Friends
The Space Marine's turn to get a super heavy. We start out with Gabriel Angelos, cut off from the rest of his chapter, but he's a Space Marine and is determined to complete his mission even if it means his death. The player navigates through some fairly easy encounters before coming across an ambush - Gabriel gets overwhelmed and all looks over before the Imperial Knight Solaria drops in to rain death and save the day.
At this point, we give the player a base and told Eldar have two webway gates in the area - a functional one to the west and one they're attempting to uncover to the east. Players need to destroy these to cut off their supply lines and while they can tackle them in either order, going for the one being dug out first makes the most sense as, if it activates, will start to spawn in more Eldar.
A Clash of Leviathans
Waking Giants and In the Company of Friends are slogs - they can last upwards of 45-60minutes. I wanted to speed things up a bit for this mission, so we went with a race to the finish line. Everyone's trying to reach the Temple Altar for their own reasons but for the Orks, it's because the Warboss Gorgutz wants an anciet spear of untold power... to slap on his backpack and use as a spike to put heads on. There's no actual timer at the start, but by subtly suggesting the need to go fast, players tended to hurry through this one more often than not.
Eldar have a base to the West and Space Marines to the East. The player needs to destroy one as their first step. The paths are fairly linear; again I wanted to focus the player and there's nothing more fun in Warhammer than taking a big army and clashing it against another big army. Who you choose to fight ultimately doesn't matter, depends on which you hate more.
Once you've destroyed a base, the rest of the map opens up - there's a massive battle between the two factions outside the gates and NOW you have a timer to reach the gates and eliminate the Eldar and Space Marine Super Heavies.
We had thought about adding a bonus objective to eliminate the remaining base, but the player has enough on his plate at this point. You can do it if you feel you want to, but it's not necessary.
