Summary of Production:
‘Tydes of Chaos’ turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and stressful projects I’ve ever worked on. As a final year project to develop a total conversion for the Source Engine, myself and five others took the task of producing this title within 6 months.
The game itself was a third-person shooter, with a primary feature of powered bullet-time (slow-motion), developed in the Source Engine. My responsibilities were placed as lead level designer and game designer initially, learning the Source Engine’s capabilities and teaching them to my team. After spending 2 months planning and writing the game design document, our ideas had spilled into a beautiful mess of “can we do this?”. Our ideas were big and time would be short, yet we were compelled to push ourselves.
Motivation took a turn for the worse when our dedicated programmer was no longer able to help our team, leaving us crippled at the start of production. Yet our document had been written and the clock was ticking, so I took it upon myself to start learning C++, aswell as running the level design. Not being a big fan of programming, I winced through pages of code wishing I understood what it meant, while I started mapping out the BSPs for our key environments.
After what felt like the longest two months of my life, Tydes of Chaos had customised ai, functional bullet-time and weapons to match. It was now that I could concentrate purely on level design, focusing on trying to produce fluid, fun and immersive gameplay.
Each level was mapped, filled with assets and then scripted for gameplay to match the story and planned design. I ended up dragging my team under one roof, for the last few weeks, to maximise efficiency. This allowed me to oversee development and manage our time-frame, while researching further into Source’s material shaders to try and squeeze a more unique look to our environments.
We had almost 10 separate levels for the game initially, but after strenuous testing of the game towards the end of the development, I could see that although the levels were pretty, as a whole the game didn’t flow properly. By the end of production, half the levels were scrapped and the best bits of gameplay were extracted and implemented into new areas, creating much richer and action-intensive environments, along with removing the previous “dead spaces” we had in the old levels. What emerged was a fast-paced fun action-shooter, with a giant mechanical spider boss!
