Towards the end of production of Spyro, Krome had secured another AAA title. This time working with Konami America to produce a video game adaptation of the iconic character Hellboy. Because of my experience on two shipped titles as a designer and experience with the pre-production phase of design I was moved on to this new project.

 

This was an amazing experience for me for multiple reasons. As a designer I was again given the chance to work on the full development cycle, pre-production through to production. It was also Krome's and my first game on next gen consoles, Xbox 360 and PS3. Just as important it was the opportunity to work with one of my most favorite characters. Not surprisingly I am fan of comics and graphic novels. The chance to work on anything, especially a video game, that had to do with Hellboy was a dream come true.

 

Because of my past success as a designer I was promoted to a senior role for this project. The design department as a whole at Krome was also growing. During this time I would be given the opportunity to work with a much larger group of designers. While on this project I learned more about design and game development then during the rest of my career up to this point.

 

Experiences In Action

Again; as with Spyro, I took part in designing all of the core systems of the game. With the experiences of my last project under my belt and with the help of new design members this process went much more smoothly. We were able to enter into the iteration phase very early on in pre-prodcution. This was important as we were working much more closely with our publisher on this project and we were able to start taking on and incorporating feedback during this crucial phase of design.

 

On this project I was again expected to wear many different design hats. I was responsible for the creation of combat systems, player progression, enemy AI and script writing. I designed 3 full levels and one of the boss encounters.

 

Always Looking To Improve

Much like with Spyro I was always looking for ways to improve the systems in which I and the team were implementing our designs. This time the problem I was encountering was the speed in which were implementing new systems and ideas. Up to that point at Krome prototyping required both a programmer and an artist to be available to implement new ideas. This was slow. I felt I had a better way to do things.

 

My solution came in two parts. The first part was to request that all designers be given access to our 3D editor. At the time this was Max. The reason for this was to allow for design to have the tools necessary to create our own test environments to implement game ideas in. This freed design from the scheduling of artists to create a level or to populate existing one with new assets. New ideas could now be implemented and iterated on at break neck speeds. This new process also had the added benefit of allowing design to import our vector maps directly into the editor and create gray box levels. Again increasing the speed in which were able to implement design ideas.

 

The second part was to change the way in which assets on a whole were created at Krome. Up to that point most of the assets created on a project were very self contained. Making changes required programmers to edit source code and update the project before being able to generate feedback. Based on my proposals Krome moved to a system that used easily accessed external data. With this new process a designer could now access almost any of the information assigned to an asset and make changes on their own. This allowed for us to implement and iterate on new ideas and systems fully independent of the rest of the team.