ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Paper Design, layout and development of:
- 'Best'
- Took over development of:
- 'Return to Valkenswaard'
- Worked with Environment Artists on beautification passes
- Attended playtest sessions and implemented feedback as provided by leads
- Ensured required narrative beats were implemented
- Worked with Animation Team to implement bookend Non-Interactive-Sequence cutscenes
Best
My first actual single player mission. The mission itself is fairly straightforward - you're holding a town when all of a sudden American Paratroopers start falling around you. Defend the town, then get out and blow up a bridge before a British armoured convoy arrives.
The map is split down the middle with one half in open fields and the other in closed pine forests. A town is to the south and the target bridge to the north. If you're fast, you can blow up the bridge before the British arrive - otherwise you need to do it while preventing them from exiting the map to the south.
Return to Valkenswaard
Originally created by the late Brian Wood, I became caretaker of it when his attention was needed on lead duties later in the project.
The mission is one of CoH's famous 'counter-attack' missions. Not literally a counter-attack, it was a term we used to refer to returning to a previous mission (with desctruction being somewhat carried over. If you blew up a church, that church was still gone). In this mission, you need to hunt down British HQ trucks and eliminate them while stopping the British from escaping the area. This is made more challenging as the British HQs are trucks and can pack up and move at the first sign of trouble.
The map is an interesting slice of the Netherlands - farms, town, canals all make for a mission where the direct route is not always the safest.
2P_The Scheldt
In between missions, I had some time to work on a multiplayer map for the expansion. The community has a love/hate relationship with The Scheldt; comp-stomp players love it, competitive players hated it.
The map is 6 players, but it's VERY small - you're almost in each other's laps at the start. There's a lot of choke points due to the water, and it's not super balanced. However, after shipping the original CoH, we learned that we needed an equal number of maps for competitive play (In other words, no choke points, lots of flanking at 100% balanced), and maps for comp-stomp (Lots of chokes, maybe a bit unbalanced).
The problem was no one informed Relic Link, so when the game went live The Scheldt was in competitive rotation on automatch.
To this day, I still get people asking me what I was thinking when I built it, especially after making Semois. My answer is usually "Sometimes I like to throw a little chaos in."
