In 2005 Krome began working with Vevendi to reboot the Spryo franchise. I was moved on to the project from the very start and began design work during the pre-production phase. This included all of the core systems such as combat, player progression and enemies. I also took part in the development of the story which including character development and script writing. Krome did not use specialized designers. We were expected to be able to design anything and everything. This master of all theme has been a signature of who I am as a designer ever since.

 

Challenges To Overcome

The most significant challenge we had to overcome was how to make Sypro a more engaging combat focused character. In previous games Spyro relied more on his breath attacks and only has rudimentary melee abilities. We needed to create a system that would allow a creature that ran on all fours to engage in hand to hand combat. The new combat system went through several iterations all of which were specced out by design then implemented in roughed out prototyping sandboxes. Through this process we created a engaging and complex combat system that relied on Spyo's horns and tail to replace what other games could do with a characters hands and feet.

 

With a mostly complete combat system now in place to guide the focus of combat we were able to set up the rules and themes for the enemies. And knowing what rules and themes were being used to create the enemies were able to set the rules and themes for the levels that the enemies would populate.

 

Lessons To Be Learned

I learned some very important lessons during this period of time. I learned the importance of prioritizing goals and tasks and the importance of staying focused on the final vision of the project. I also learned that through the completion of the prioritized systems other systems will flow naturally from them.

 

Contributions To Be Made

Even at this stage there was still only 3 full-time designers at Krome. We were still pretty inexperienced and the systems we had in place for creating designs were very rough. The best example of this was the design process for the creation of levels. During the first few months of production all level designs were being done on paper. I mean that we would literally draw maps on paper and hand them off to the artists. This system was slow and cumbersome. Changes would require a designer to take an eraser to the map to make updates.

 

I saw this as a problem. Not just to the quality of levels but to the speed in which we could iterate on and make changes to the maps. Because of my art background I instinctively knew there was a better way. Vector graphics. I had some experience with Illustrator at that stage and knew that vector graphics would provide the team with the perfect set of tools to make better maps. I made the first level at Krome using Illustrator and after that moment all projects at Krome would use Illustrator for level design.