Project Description & Responsibilities
Warhammer 40K: Dark Millennium Online (DMO) was a MMORPG project under development at Vigil Games. DMO heavily utilized a series of modular environmental kits strategies to construct large portions of world structures and dungeons. When I joined the team I was tasked to further develop, expand and utilize these systems in order to create a MMO scale world for players to experience.
Responsibilities include:
Environment Art
World Building & Level Design
Modular Kit Strategy Development
Production Team Management
Technical Creative Direction
Base Modular Kits
The most granular kit strategy was developed through the Gothic Kit. It was used to proof out the capabilities of the modular asset pipeline as well as validate world building capabilities using prefabs assembled from the modular set.
This kit was a collaboration of our awesome environment art team, of which I contributed to as well as led periodically as needed. As the acting environment art lead and technical environment artist on the team, it was my responsibility to maintain, iterate, and expand on this set throughout pre-production for modularity, performance, and usability.
The Gothic Kit became the foundation from which the rest of the projects modular kits were built and in turn heavily influenced other projects throughout the studio.
Panels Kit: Multi-State Destructible Set
DMO’s combat design system required environments to include features such as multi-state destructible assets.
To meet this feature request I led a small strike team which prototyped and integrated a series of modular pieces we referred to as ‘panels’ into the modular set system. This team consisted of myself and another senior environment artist, a game play systems designer and a game play engineer.
Large Scale Kit: Stacking Structures
These assets were larger assets utilized in open world settings, where more granular solutions became to expensive for the rendering engine to be able to handle in a MMO game setting.
I led a small strike team consisting of two other environment artists in order to proof a content pipeline consisting of larger scale modular structures.
PvP Arena
I headed up a small strike team of multi-disciplined specialists to create a PvP arena map. The team consisted of another world builder, a dedicated environment artist and several game systems designers and engineers. I contributed to the effort as the PvP strike team lead, environment art director/lead, level designer and world builder for this arena.
This map was taken to a playable Alpha state in order to evaluate the PvP arena creation processes and engine performance for future content. It also served as a test bed for designers to iterate on their combat systems, features, and player abilities in PvP scenarios.
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DMO Dungeons
I also functioned as the PvE Dungeons Strike Team lead on DMO. The dungeons demonstrated the wide range of content we were able to generate utilizing the flexibility of our modular kits systems developed for DMO. The strike team consisted of world builders, level designers and game systems designers. We had 2-3 dungeons going at any given time, each headed up by a world builder paired with a level designer.
On top of heading up my own series of dungeons, I was responsible for supervising and driving the entire Strike Team delivering all the PvE dungeon content for DMO. As the environment lead, I also directed the environments team to create various modular kits, props and hero assets to be used in realizing the vision of DMO’s visual design.
The result showcases the collaborative effort of all those team’s work coming together. The images and videos below feature my direct contributions including level design, world building, lighting and post processing features (such as custom Color Look Up Tables). The art assets were generated by the environment team which I led, directed and contributed to.
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