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.
