Billy Smith

Before I ended up on Lone Echo 2, I was initially hired as a multiplayer level designer to work on new maps for Echo Combat which had just released a day/2 before my offer from Ready at Dawn.

Echo Combat is a PvP Zero-g Shooter in VR with some long ish kill times and a really fun movement model that avoided all the jank and disconnect found in most VR games as the movement was all based on your hands grabbing onto and pushing off of surfaces which was super comfortable and had a ton of depth being able to accelerate with your gun when floating and throwing yourself off of catapults and teammates to boost off of them.

I really had a blast working on this game as it really scratched my itch for mp fps but in vr with the kind of dance I enjoy where it isn’t just getting the first hit.

The Skirmish area for the Echo Combat wing of Echo VR’s social lobby as seen above was the first thing I got to to work on after my onboarding project to learn RAD’s in house scripting and other tools/kinks of the engine which used Maya as it’s editor.

Essentially, the Skirmish area was a PvP space within the social lobby for players to practice/warm up while searching for a match or just play more casually and learn the game. 

The way it works is that there is a window with a view into the space for anyone that want’s to watch along with some weapon/ability select podiums and “Spawn Orbs“ for Orange and Blue team. Grabbing one of these orbs will bring you to the chosen teams spawn room which has a “Return” orb you can grab if you want to leave.

The other way out is to die which respawns you outside by the window to change weapons and jump back in to whichever team you feel like or watch if playing some honor rules games in lobby. The spawn orbs have a player count for each team above them so that people can self balance teams.

The biggest challenge making this was that we needed safe team spawn rooms on each end, but also had to spatially fit the whole thing within the negative space footprint of the rest of the lobby level without overlapping it, and another wing of the lobby was just on the other side of the blue team side.

I wanted to create something more representative of the kinds of geo you fight around in the actual maps rather than the simple area of just a few boxes it originally was, and to incorporate things like the destructible energy barriers featured on some maps so players could get familiar with them here while also making it something you could consider a fun little map in it’s own right.

While testing we would do honour rules round based team deathmatch’s as if scrimming, we ended up having so much fun with it the idea was floated around to make it a real mode and crank out a few of these small maps that could be made quicker than the planned Capture Point and Payload maps.

That didn’t happen but it was still a lot of fun, and in hindsight I think probably a direction we should have gone in as the game didn’t have much content at launch and that would have added more variety in less time.

Environment art by Aaron Corbin

Lighting by Ted Mebratu

After Skirmish I worked on a new Payload map, testing new variations of the maps 3 sections every other day, together and in isolation depending on what I was focusing on refining.

I used Blender to do all the modelling and got the tools team to make me a modified FBX importer for Maya that would assign materials matching names in our database so I could just import one file, hit a button to generate collision, save scene and build level to model much faster and more freely but still get in game/headset as quickly and painlessly as possible to iterate and feel things out.

The map got to the point of being design locked faster than expected ahead of art being ready to work on it so I was moved over to Lone Echo 2.

This was absolutely the most enjoyable period at RAD for me and exactly the kind of work I enjoy doing most. Also really interesting to design around 6 DoF + Zero-G as players can flip upside down and use ceiling geo as cover, which introduces all sorts of line of site considerations.

Unfortunately, while enjoyed internally, the map was never released as new content for Echo Combat dropped in priority vs Lone Echo 2 and Echo Arena’s quest port so I can’t show.

After my time on Echo Combat, I was moved onto Lone Echo 2 where I became responsible for all of the side content.

This involved creating a bunch of test levels using existing gameplay prefabs/mechanics to come up with a variety of interesting things to do and puzzles utilising them. I then fleshed out the best of those fitting the ability usage and gating requirements given for the upgrade rewards and found a home for them within the games hub level.

To minimise the art burden as much as possible I scavenged the crit path for art to reuse, kitbashing as far as I could, in the end only having a few minor art requests and optimisations needed later. I gave lighting artists an initial rundown on the spaces gameplay and anything to keep in mind, then feedback as they worked, which honestly they were great and so I didn’t need to give much.

I used our mission scripting tools to control level flow and dialogue which I did a first pass of with our TTS tools to get important gameplay related lines in and some context before handing off to narrative designer David Mahoney who filled out and refined the lines and narrative context. I then implemented the new lines along with any notes.

Some nice ideas and feedback came from this collaboration and the additional context then fed back into the gameplay and dressing of the spaces. Was a surprisingly fun step I ended up wishing we focused on sooner as the levels got a huge boost from the added context.

I then maintained the level and dialogue scripting, fixing any issues that came up and making sure all possible completion/skip orders were accounted for as a lot of dialogue would change depending on what the player had already talked about/done in a non linear fashion, freeing up the narrative designers that typically handled some of this to focus on crit path.

Later while waiting for some systems to be implemented, I offered to do a pass on the terrain mesh and rock instance placement for one of the major exterior asteroid locations still in blockout form to help out the art team.

After knocking the first pass out quickly in Maya, I was given the chance to take the art pass all the way and so sent the terrain and reference geo over to Blender where I sculpted and UV’d the final terrain patches including Macro and Lightmap UV’s. Back in Maya I generated lods with our tools (aside from a couple problem meshes I manually had to do in Blender) and organised the scene for HLOD atlas generation.

The only currently public thing I can show of the work I did on LE2 right now is the above super short clip from a cave area I worked on, but the release date of August 24th 2021 was just announced so should be able to show more soon.

I initially blocked out the above space to proof out the level using a temp rock asset and a biomass ball prefab (basically a sphere with some gameplay properties) to figure out the layout/gameplay.

When final rock assets and biomass cluster prefabs were available, I rebuilt the area on top of my blockout using those which was a bit of a puzzle to make work as the biomass bulbs undulate which would look bad clipping into the rock, so had to be mindful of just having the static edges of the cluster prefabs clip with the rock and not have any exposed backface which was awkward as the prefabs were made to be placed on flat surfaces.

Then the space was lit by Guillaume Deschamps-Michel who made it look too good with their lighting pass, really happy with how this area ended up looking and feeling to explore in headset.