Systems

My two largest contributions to the systems design were with the rebuilding of Jak's core gameplay systems and with the creation and management of player progression.

 

Rebuilding the core gameplay systems of Jak is my way of saying that we didn't receive any assets from Sony so we had to make our own from scratch. This meant I spent a lot of time replaying Jak games and reproducing the systems I saw on paper. This included animation lists and rules, movement distances and combat systems. Once on paper and approved I would work with animators and programers to iterate until the final assets were perfect copies.

 

Player progression consisted of designing and managing a collection of intertwined systems, a small part of it looks something like this.

• Create the list of weapons and powers, tracking attributes such and usefulness and strength

• Then plot out when and where the player will be able to access them. Making sure to keep in mind important platformer concepts like front loading content and overall project vision

• This information establishes which tools the player has available to solve puzzles and what types of enemies can be encountered based on weapon / armor strength

• This information is then used to design the levels

After designing and implementing these systems it was my responsibility to manage the information through development. At times this meant that if a power or weapon had to be moved I would replot the progression and pass out changes that needed to be made. When we made changes to the length of some levels I replotted the progression of the players leveling and adjusted the enemy difficulty scale and the rate experience was earned. In the end I spent a lot of time tracking and adjusting information in more than a few excel spreadsheets.

 

I also worked with the team in the creation and implementation of the rest of the core systems. This included weapons, special powers, upgrades and enemy AI.