Firefall

The ARES Team

During The Ares Team, players are captured by rebels and sent to a brainwashing facility. Watch the video. Skip to 32:25 for footage of the level.

The ARES Team

Once they are captured, players must find a way to escape their cells, and find a way to disrupt the Warden's evil plans. However, they are free to choose what they want to do first: Get their weapons, Get their battleframes, or disrupt the EMP field that renders their jump jets useless. Intrpid players can even ignore all of these tasks and go straight for the Warden, armed with little more than some improvised weapons and harsh language.

The ARES Team

We set up the spaces to be reminicent of a present day prison, most of the non-combat spaces were pulled in to give a feeling of claustrophobia. The interiors are dimly lit and gloomy, which contrasts with the outside areas, like the workyard and the main courtyard.

Defense of Dredge

The Defense of Dredge is a 10-man raid encounter where the players must defend the accord stronghold of Dredge against an assault led by a contingent of the Chosen's most fearsome war machines. Watch a video from an early PTS build. Note that balance changes have occurred that have substantially raised the difficulty of this encounter.

Defense of Dredge

Improvised, temporary cover allows the players to retake the city from enemy hands.

Devil's Tusk Warfront

As part of our overhaul to the in game spaces, I modified many of the open world areas in Devil's Tusk to work better with our current combat. Open areas have been given cover, with additional areas for the players to jump to and use their jump jets to their advantage.

Devil's Tusk Warfront

Devil's Tusk has a wide variety of spaces for players to use in their fight against the Chosen, such as lava fields, the jungle and a desolate beach facing a Chosen stronghold.

Holdout Jericho

Holdout: Jericho is a game mode for five players, where they square off against increasingly difficult waves of enemies, with better and better rewards. Watch the video from our PTS.

Holdout Jericho

At the end of a round, a dropship appears in order to give the players a chance to evacuate. In order to secure all of the rewards, players must survive the entire round and make it to the dropship. If players die in combat, they only recieve half of the rewards.

Holdout Jericho

Players must coordinate with their team in order to hold all of the entrances of the base, as well as back each other up when they are forced to retreat to the next line of defenses.

Sertao

As part of our upcoming v1.6 Update, I worked with the world building team to refactor half of the areas in the Sertao area with new cover and gameplay spaces.

Sertao

Sertao's landscape features are very different from Coral Forest. The design challenges it presented were refreshing and fun to work on.

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Studio

• Red 5 Studios

Release Date

• July 29 2014

Game Engine

• Proprietary
• Google SketchUp

Description

Firefall is an MMO/FPS hybrid developed by Red 5 Studios in Irvine, CA. I joined the team as a Senior Level Designer in April of 2015. As one of the two level designers at the studio, my primary responsibilities were to work with the world building and scripting team in order block out gameplay spaces and create whiteboxes to showcase our updated combat mechanics. Our overall goal was to create a wide variety of content for the players to go through during their initial leveling experience.

We used the in-game tools and Google SketchUp in order to create and iterate on blockouts. Once the blockout was completed, we worked with scripting and world building to iterate and act on internal playtest feedback, altering the space as needed in order to work with scripts and needed artwork.

Level designers acted as a liason between the scripting and world building teams, and would regularly organize people on the asigned teams to mitigate workflow blockages and ensure that evenryone was focusing their work in a productive direction. Additionally, the level design team was responsible for ensuring that the level blockout was completed with plenty of time to iterate and allow the appropriate level of polish.

Additionally, as a member of the combat team at Red 5, I took the lead on getting our third raid encounter fleshed out and ready for development.

Development Time

• I worked on Firefall for approximately 7 months. In that time, I completed 5 mission blockouts, two raid encounters, one instanced operation, one holdout mission, and several dozen open world areas. I also worked on refactoring several existing missions to work with the current state of our game.

Tasks

• Create and document level blockouts for use by the scripting and world building teams
• Iterate and gather feedback on level layouts
• Place cover and iterate on open world combat spaces