NICK PARDE

- OVERVIEW -

 

~1 year production - Planetside Arena was an attempt to expand the Planetside franchise with quicker, bite sized (single session) ways to play the game (instead of a large, never ending war like Planetside 2).  It used the exact same engine as Planetside 2 (which was about 8 years old at the time of making this game and only slightly upgraded) and we were going to have a very limited development cycle.  Game modes like Battle Royale, Massive Clash (large team based mode), Conquest, Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, etc were all planned for release (but ultimately mostly scrapped).  Since the production time was short, we decided to focus on one main large map which was a heavy remastered / revised version of a Amerish from Planetside 2 (called Echoes of Amerish) and try to make it as awesome as possible. 

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I heavily contributed to and oversaw nearly everything about the production of the map, including a lot of the art direction (with the help of the artists on the team). I worked directly with the designers about how to sculpt the terrain (a lot of which I did myself) bases and other POIs, along with working with the artists to define the overall look of the game. I also coordinated with the graphics programmer to figure out post process solutions to get the game to look a bit different from Planetside 2, while making the shooting gameplay work at a distance (easier to see enemies at distance).  I felt the original source level of Amerish was much to 'samey' across the map.  I would often time have a very difficult time figuring out where I was, or where I should be going. 

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To solve this, I first decided to focus on one large aspect of the map (a central mountain) and to try and make it feel 'grand'.  We accomplished this by lowering, removing, altering all surrounding areas so that the central mountain just would rise way above the rest of the areas. Then, each area around the map was given a theme (Forest, Wartorn, Alien Crystal, Toxic, River and Farm), which each had unique arrangement of terrain, rocks, trees, features, etc.

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We also built several 'arena' maps that were intended for smaller game modes, such as deathmatch and capture the flag. 

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The game came out late 2019 (shortly after I had already left the company) and (for many reasons) it ultimately failed.  However, I was extremely proud of what the team and I had accomplished, and it was fun to put together.

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