About my Role: In Rock Rampage I performed a few roles simultaneously. I was the teams Level Designer, which means I created all 12 levels in the game. I made annotated maps, built the levels and play-tested/balanced each one. I textured the terrain and made props for the levels, so I also acted as Environmental/3D Artist. As the teams producer, I also built our backlog and managed the production cycle using AGILE:SCRUM with Jira. Our production cycle was 7 sprints (each 2 weeks long).

About the Level Design: When I first started, I was unsure of how the levels would be created. Our lead designer didn’t know whether the game should be Side-scrolling or 3D 3rd Person, and we considered making the terrain destructible at first, but opted out. The method for making the levels took a while to get right. Ultimately I used a NURBS curve in Maya to create the topography, which I then rigorously tested with each level, before moving on to texturing.

About the Desert: Texturing these 4 levels was a lot of fun. I made waterfalls out of sand, and spikes of sandstone. These were the final 4 levels of the game so they are more difficult for the player, but making them was faster, because I had the method down pretty well by then. The Terrain is housed in an “island” object which was made by our 3D artist, along with the skybox.

About the Snow: The snow levels feature snowmen that were made by our lead designer. While texturing them, I was very picky about the frost buildup, and I added snow leopard footprints. I added the glowing snowflakes which fall randomly based on a noise pattern. These levels took longer to balance and they are medium difficulty.

About the Forest: The Forest levels were the first ones I created. I used modular pieces that one of our artists made, and these pieces showed a clearly repeating texture. They had the problem of being to rough when driving over, and it made for an inorganic topography in the terrain. Assembling these levels was time consuming as well, so I changed my method after the forest biome to use NURBS Curves, which addressed these issues.

About the Production: In addition to being the team’s Level Designer I was also the Producer. This meant that I had to juggle the management of Jira on top of testing and building the levels. I brainstormed with the Lead Designer and built a backlog. I organized our Sprints considering our feature priorities. I conducted Sprint Kickoffs, and validated cards as they were completed, in accordance with SCRUM. Overall it was a production with a rough start. I struggled to get my team motivated for a while, and our early sprints were pretty bad, but we built communication and eventually made up for lost ground.