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Jacob Mills (Senior Level Designer, Roll7)
Location: Room 2001, West Hall
Date: Wednesday, March 22
Time: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass
Topic: Design
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: Video
Audience Level: All
Rollerdrome combines skating and shooting, two well-trodden verbs in games, to create something entirely new: an arena-based skater-shooter. While its influences are worn on its sleeves and there are design choices that can be adapted directly from those sources, the act of blending these genres births an entirely new set of design challenges that require their own solutions unique to this project.
In this talk, Roll7 Senior Level Designer Jacob Mills will examine his experience on the project via a series of level postmortems—chronicling the problems presented in each, the solutions found, and showing how these lessons were applied to subsequent levels and to the design process itself. All whilst working with a new, entirely remote development team.
Attendees will gain insight into the complete level design process on Rollerdrome, covering both its strengths and its weaknesses. This includes adapting established techniques to an entirely new genre, but the process extends beyond greybox, to broader advice on communicating intent when joining a new (remote) team.
This is primarily for level designers joining new projects in unfamiliar genres, but it will offer insight for disciplines that work alongside level design (eg environment art, tools programmers, etc). The perspective will be most relevant to developers at remote studios in the indie/AA space.