game & level designer

Madagascar was my first shipped title as a game designer.  On this project, we used Toys For Bob's proprietary scripting tool internally known as "TFB-script" which ran on the "TFB-tool."  This early version of the tool ran in conjunction with the Renderware middleware platform.  TFBscript was an incredibly powerful menu based scripting language that gave designers access to about 40 core op-codes.  The would be like check value, set value, for each, loop, find subset, check [set]. set [set]. play (sounds/animations), stop, displace velocity, etc.  This allowed Toys For Bob designers to script 98% of the game without an engineer intervention.  TFB CTO Fred Ford's philosophy was to empower creatives to be creative and minimize the amount of time they had to spend doing uncreative things.  The other side of this nefarious wisdom coin was that the designers would make all of the game and would therefore be responsible for fixing all the bugs.

Madagascar would prove to be a fertile ground for laying the foundation of my career.  On this title, there was nothing we didn't touch or implement ourselves.  We created level mesh in Maya, we did all the collision adjustments and fixes, mini-games, so many mini-games, user interface, writing, cinematics, we were pretty much our own testers until the last two months of the project, balance, bug fixing, you name it.  Two projects that were somewhat outside of the regular designer description that I had were setting up all of triggers and heads up displays that showed you entering new zones with the zone names displaying.  This was something I had come up with and subsequently had to touch every level in the game to implement.  No pressure!  Additionally, I would estimate over 50% of the VFX in Madagascar was done by me.  Again, touching just about every level!

In the Jungle Banquet level, I was responsible for the mud slides, melon smash mini-game, the very strange Frog Fruit jump contest mini-game, cinematics, and most of the item/npc placements.

I inherited the Back to the Beach level when most of the design was already done.  My only responsibilities were to tie up loose ends and  polish it up.   Part of that consisted of item/npc placements and a lot of bug fixing.