Saturday, 31 December 2016




I am very happy to of worked on some cool and interesting games in the last 2 years. Here I will show some brief 'making of' for the work I did on Star Wars Battlefront (2015)  and Battlefield 1 (2016).



For Star Wars battlefront the EA Criterion team created the speeder bike mission through the forests of Endor. We used a workflow that we believe in for most cases which is 'build it twice, build it better'. We build a rough version of the level quickly in Unity, with simplified level geometry, it will normally be made to roughly PS3 level visuals but we only need the fidelity good enough so we can see if we have something fun and our core game mechanics and vehicle handling are working as we want. After extensive level play testing and layout iteration we then transfer our work to our hero 'pretty'engine Frostbite when we are happy with the gameplay. The reason for using this method is its much quicker to get to something fun in Unity, and in the long run this approach is quicker than just going straight in to the final engine which has a longer set up time and is generally harder to 'find the fun'. Personally I worked on the level design here, which in this case is the route you take through the forest and the challenges you face on the way.


Side by side of the level in Unity (Left), and Frostbite (Right).


Tuesday, 27 December 2016

Games work with EA Criterion 2015

2 Years in the game industry are now in the rear view mirror for me with EA Criterion Games, and what a great experience working in games has been.

I spent most of 2015 working 'Beyound Cars' or 'Trafalgar' as it was code named internally.
Sadly EA pulled the plug on this project in April 2016. It was a really unique racing game that had land air and sea races, some races with a combination of all 3 vehicle types, set in a tropical island paradise, powered by the mighty Frostbite engine. I guess a combination of Forza Horizon 3, Steep, and Burnout Paradise best describes what the game was... And it was really fun!  Here are some concept images and reference (internet sourced) that shows what the game could of been...