Reach - nDreams Elevation
While at nDreams, I worked on a variety of gameplay and tooling systems for Reach, including the player’s shield, mag gloves, grappling arm and special arrows
The Shield - a tool with a million verbs:
The shield and all its verbs came to fruition over the entirety of Reach’s development, slowly becoming quite a goliath of a tool with many, many challenges to solve.
How do you throw a shield?
Because of the million different ways a player would throw the shield in VR, I developed quite a few aim assist systems to help accommodate it, that then helped other aim assisted objects. A weighted aim assist system that let you tag different objects allowed designers to tag specific actors as higher aim assist priorities, and preferred aim assist locations allowed designers to visualise exactly where on an actor is the best place to aim assist to. This let the player throw the shield in crowded scenes with great accuracy, no matter how much noise was in front of them.
These aim assist systems were most heavily used in the shield’s environmental actors - ricochet points, charge points and impale points - to create a visual level design set up; plop the actor in a level, set where you want the shield to impact, drag where you want the shield to ricochet to, and the systems will handle the rest!
For the shield, alongside other tools, I also created interactive gyms to let other folks test different gameplay methods of using the verbs - these were commonplace throughout development.
The Grappling Arm - Modular level placements, modular uses:
The grappling arm was a single verb with many uses, opposite to the shield, with a very open ended interaction system. If the interaction point you grappled to was climbable, the player would be drawn to them; otherwise, the grappled object could do anything it wanted. Because these systems were reliant on the object responding to being grappled, it allowed for some interesting tool interactions, such as being able to grapple to the shield while it’s impaled in walls.
Combat
I spearheaded a lot of combat design on reach, creating systems myself, and guiding other’s systems to achieve a coherent combat sandbox. This work Culminated in the combat seen in the released game. One large tenet that combat was held to was keeping every verb relevant within the combat experience - The shield and grappling arm could be used for traversal, but I wanted to make those verbs relevant in combat as well to keep the interaction ecosystem similar no matter where the player was in the game. This culminated in a lot of experimentation to give each tool a unique place in the combat sandbox. As a result of this, tools were given specific abilities in combat that matched their verbs, and were built to each accomodate a niche that could be used nicely in combination (2:11-3:15)
Smaller systems
Alongside hero assets, a good chunk of my time on atlas was also spent creating an assortment of different systems for smaller gameplay explorations. Some of these systems included:
Guided ricochets for shield throws
Modular aim assist systems for throwables, with parameters to fit area of effect or accurate throwing
Inventory systems for storing key items in your gauntlets
Arrow inventory and equip systems, for firing different arrow types
Interactive plug and socket systems, with functionality to pull wires around corners
A prototype scanner used to clean a surface and reveal information
Tooling for smaller props to randomise when placed, speeding up environment and level design set dressing
