Game Design Vol. 1 - The Plumber and The Hedgehog

If you look at the visuals from 1998’s Tomb Raider III to 20  years later the difference in visuals is phenomenal, but if you look at a Mario game from 10 years ago the difference in visual fidelity is actually fairly small. So while Sony and Microsoft are pushing consumers towards all the pixels your eyes can handle, how are Nintendo and Mario still selling well?

After completing Sonic Mania recently and revisiting Super Mario 3D Land on the 3DS, I decided to dive in to what makes Mario platforming so good....

CLICK BELOW FOR THE MAIN ARTICLE:
http://andrewlawson3d.blogspot.co.uk/p/if-you-look-at-visuals-from-1998s-tomb.html

Star Wars Battlefront 2

I have been working as a Game Designer on SWBF 2 for the last year, working with Criterion games creating Starfighter Assault.  Here are some highlights of a couple of the levels I was lead Designer for.

So what does a game designer do? Well, first as a team we decide on a location for the level and then draw up some ideas of what could happen. I then take these ideas and more of my own and experiment in a white box type level different scenarios and try to find what would be the most fun. I will  build simple geometry in Maya and then in this case testing in our Unity prototype environment. Weeks or months of iteration will happen until myself and the team are feeling good about what we have. Here are some examples of what the levels 'Ryloth' and 'The Unknown Regions' looked like 6/9 months before we shipped the game.

Once we have confidence in the direction of the white box level we move to our production Engine Frostbite. After many months of iterations the final product is in the video below.