Darksiders 2

MY ROLE IN THE PROJECT

My tenure at Vigil was a turbulent time for the company and it's parent company THQ. Even though I was hired to design encounters in DMO There were periods where I would be handed off to the Darksiders team to help them power through deadlines. My work on the project was less as a designer than is was as construction worker. I was given three main types of tasks. I was assigned bugs from the database pertaining to getting the player, or the camera, stuck "out of the world". Fixes ranged from debugging visibility and cameras, to creating and modifying triggers, kill volumes, and invisible barriers. I was assigned the task of finding picturesque locations for Death to spawn at, since the continue menu would show a camera panning around Death, showing off the level around him, before panning back to become the gameplay camera. The final type of task I was given was to optimize the implementation of the visibility system, based on room boxes and portals, in various areas of the game to increase performance. I worked mostly on the "overworld" sections located between dungeons. The task was to efficiently cull as many objects and areas as possible, allowing the target hardware, the PS3 and Xbox 360, to handle the beautiful and epic vistas found throughout the game.

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The game was full of epic questions like, "What would it be like to grab that thing by the reins and fly it?". It was up to me, and some of the other lower ranked designers, to answer the more mundane questions like, "what if I just jumped off the side of the bridge here for no good reason?"

Whenever you launch the game, the continue screen shows Death standing at your latest checkpoint. Various camera angles show off Death's armor and weapons. My job was to position him so that the cameras also showed off the world, hinting at nearby points of interest.

The art for the game was filled with uneven edges and complex set dressing, so the game was lousy with edge case bugs, toe holds, and cracks which might allow the player to escape the levels. My job was to smooth them out and close them up with blocking volumes.

The large and beautiful vistas were also the setting for many battles. To allow for those battles and that vista to exist at the same time meant carefully culling every asset which wasn’t visible. Not an automatic process, but one run by triggers to manually load and unload assets.

The last thing you wanted to happen while you were executing a difficult series of parkour moves was for the world, or just the ledge you're diving for, to blink out of existence on you. I made sure that loading triggers were as tight as possible while still ensuring that no visible assets ever got unloaded.

Great vista shots like this one could include huge low poly distant set pieces and small highly detailed gameplay spaces. I worked on setting up the triggers to the transition from low to high poly would happen at the last second, and would never occur where the camera could see the LOD pop.

The game was built on a 'hub and spoke' level design theory, often with the boss showing up right smack dab in the middle of the hub at the end. Ensuring that the rest of the level was properly accluded during these encounters was crucial to ensuring good performance during boss fights.