My Role in the project

My initial responsibility on Transformers RotDS was writing the story for what would become Chapters Two through Six. There were a number of drastically different drafts, some elements of which can be seen below, but once the final story was nailed down I developed a rough layout for all five levels, including enemy spawns and scripted events. I then handed off Chapters Three, Four, and Five, and focused on bringing Chapter Two, The Lost Vault, and Chapter Three, Getaway, to completion.

Working on T:RotDS at Edge of Reality was the most chaotic and creative job I’ve ever had. It began simply enough, with a mandate to create a Transformers game on the cheap. High Moon Studios, which had created the much loved War for Cybertron game series, and the less well received Dark of the Moon movie tie-in, were tiring of the license and wanted to work on other IP (I guess I should get this disclaimer out of the way. Everything recounted is based on what information, or what stories, I was told at the time. Now back to the show…) Activision were looking for a new developer to take the game engine and assets and use them to create a new game in the series, with a minimum of new assets or features. Edge of Reality won the opportunity to create that game based on a pitch which would see a crossover of three transformers worlds, utilizing a few storytelling tricks to allow the game to lean heavily on old assets.

In this pitch the game’s plot would revolve around a single concept, that the planet sized world eating transformer, Unicron, was a pan-dimensional entity. A single entity with aspects existing within multiple parallel universes at once. Unicron would discover that there is a universe in which it does not exist, the Transformers Cinematic Universe. It decides then to rectify that absence by breaking into the universe through a trans-dimensional portal. To do this it would need to create a new herald, Galvatron, and send him through a tiny (well, relative to the size of a planet) portal, where he would assemble the beacon that would allow one aspect of Unicron to cross over into that universe.

This is the fun part, though. The Galvatron selected would be from the Gen 1 Transformers universe, the cartoon universe, where Unicron had already been defeated. Unicron would punch a hole from that universe into the War for Cybertron Universe, where one of its aspects still survives. The Autobots of the G1 Cartoon universe would manage to break through the Decepticon defenses and send Optimus Prime and Bumblebee through the same portal to try and stop him. This would all be in an opening movie, but at the end of it we would have a Cell Shaded Bee and Optimus in the War for Cybertron world (thus only two new assets). They would get separated right away, and then most of the game would revolve around each of the cartoon transformers adventuring through the War for Cybertron world. Galvatron would elude his autobot pursuers and meet up with Megatron, they would then create the portal to the TCU earth, and in a third act twist, Megatron would kill Galvatron and demand Unicron make him the new herald. (That way cartoon galvatron is never a playable character and is only rarely seen in prerendered cutscenes, so call that half a new asset.) Finally WfC Megatron would go through the portal to TCU earth, followed by WfC Optimus and Grimlock, and Gen 1 Optimus and Bumblebee. Once again the Autobots get to recruit some locals to their cause, and in the final showdown we see Autobots from three worlds all fight side by side against Megatron as a massive portal in space is opening to reveal a hungry (WfC style) Unicron.

Development began with that basic story laid out. Our design team started out by creating a number of sandbox levels to find what worked and what was possible with the assets we had. We created races through skyscraper canyons, flights through horizontal forests, massive battle arenas, platforming sections, and shooting galleries. We then took the most fun spaces and created set pieces which would slot into the various yadda-yadda-yadda moments of the story outline.

It was then that the first of many hurdles came up, someone higher up didn’t like us using Unicron. From my level within the company, I don’t know where the order came down from, but the order was clear, we would not be able to use Unicron or Galvatron in our story. Sure, that was the fundamental unifying concept of the story, but the decision was made, and we had to adjust. Oh, also, we wouldn’t be able to have more than one animated transformer. This might have been a more internal call, it would take a lot of time and effort to create even one of these cartoon versions, so maybe they decided to just focus on one and have him appear in a more tightly controlled setting. So, the fix would be to rewrite the story. Now, WfC Decepticons created a portal to TCU Earth, stole some maguffin, and Movie Autobots followed them back through the portal to WfC Cybertron to retrieve it.

This was not too big a change for me, the LDs hadn’t made too much progress developing the actual grayboxes of the levels, so relatively little would need to be altered, and we could just redirect our efforts going forward. With the plot settling down to a final form [insert ominously bitter laughter here], I was assigned specific chapters of the new version of the story. I would start on chapter two, with the WfC Autobots being sent to investigate an anomaly, where they would get discovered, run away, and finally be saved by Grimlock. That was nearly the entirety of the direction I was given for these three chapters. From there I was given free reign to select characters (from the assets in the game already) and tell the story how I wanted.

I wrote a LDD with a story which revolved around the Autobots Arcee, and Elita One, and the Decepticon Slipstream, three female Transformers. Narratively the idea was that these three had been omitted from the WfC stories because they were fighting on a different front than Optimus was. In this theater of war Elita One was the commander of the Autobots, Arcee was her trusted lieutenant, and Slipstream one of their most dangerous foes. I wanted new, unexplored narratives, but the higher-ups were only interested in reused assets. However, I was able to make the case that Arcee and Slipstream already existed in the High Moon studio assets, as alternate skins used only in multiplayer, and thus fairly easy ports rather than new assets. There weren’t any Elita One assets, but she would only be a voice on comms, and so would require no new assets.

The story and levels I designed would play out like this: Arcee gets called away from a battle to investigate an anomaly. The anomaly is far out in a long uninhabited part of Cybertron. Once chrome cityscapes are now weathered into rusty canyon filled badlands. She spots the Decepticons bringing something through the portal, but has to run when she gets spotted. She’s chased to an abandoned train station which she reactivates so she can escape by train. This is unfortunate, as the tracks are out and she crashes. We then cut to Movie Optimus, Bumblebee, and Hound, fighting their way out of the Decepticons’ base around the portal. Optimus falls, but gives Bumblebee and Hound enough time to escape. Then we cut back to Arcee, sneaking through a factory trying to kill Slipstream and rescue her unit of Autobots which were captured trying to rescue her. Slipstream executes her hostages and Arcee finally makes her attack. Boss battle time. Arcee is outclassed but before she losses the battle Grimlock comes smashing through a wall and scares Slipstream off.

After creating graybox levels for this entire storyline, we ran into the second great hurdle. We were told we couldn’t use any of the three main characters of my level, Arcee, Elita One, or Slipstream, among a few other characters. They even said we couldn’t use the character Caliber, a character I made up just so I could let Slipstream kill a named character (without killing a real named character). Ok, Ok, work the problem. We recast Arcee with Sideswipe, and Slipstream with Sharpshot, and keep the story mostly the same. We rewrote the design docs to fit this new storyline while we continued to script the level progression.

Then, only weeks later, we would have yet another hurdle to overcome, and this was the big one. We were now told that we could not have any crossover between the worlds. No portal. No movie characters mixing with Cybertron characters; No playable cartoon characters at all. This bombshell was dropped three months into, what would end up, a nine month sprint to the ship date. One of the other directives was that the parts which took place in the TCU needed to be more of a movie tie-in, since the game was going to be released at the same time as the Transformers Age of Extinction film. So while we would be getting the resources to create three new characters, they would all be new TCU characters which were going to be featured in the upcoming movie, Grimlock, Drift, and Lockdown. None of which had been part of our story treatments up until that point. All of this, of course, required a major story rewrite. The graybox levels we had already produced were all obsolete.

This is where the team got creative, in a number of ways. The levels as they were written could not be used, but the set pieces could be. A new story would be written by the Design Lead around these existing set piece battles. While most of the design team worked on cutting their respective levels into the standalone chunks to be salvaged, two of our designers, would simply churn out interesting play spaces using simple BSPs. They produced dozens of these modular prefab play spaces in a matter of days. The rest of the team would then grab these rooms, adjust them as needed, and stitch them together along with the existing set piece spaces to create the new levels.

I absolutely loved this period. The frustration of the earlier setbacks were quickly forgotten in a massive rush of productivity. I got to write another design/story doc, and while it was another rewrite, I would be more free to create a new narrative in this iteration, rather than continuing to wedge new characters into narratives which weren’t written for them. The story doc we got back for the Design lead was functional. For each chapter of gameplay there would be a brief summary consisting of, a list of existing set pieces to include, a playable character list, and a simple one to two paragraph synopsis of events.

I was having such a good time I went a bit overboard. The six designers on the team were assigned two chapters each. But after a few months of development it became clear that I had created around five or six chapters worth of gameplay and story out of my two chapter synopsis. So when the Design Lead did a review of the game’s progress he decided, instead of trimming my chapters down to size, we would cut my levels into five whole chapters. I would continue development on two of the chapters, while other designers on the team would handle development of the other three. In the end, the combined five chapters I had initially designed and laid out would become nearly half the entire game’s playtime. And the two chapters I would bring to completion would still constitute a full quarter of the game’s playtime.

All images above have been used with the permission of Edge of Reality. Images are not to be duplicated or published elsewhere.