Friday, August 31, 2012

Cutscene, LUA work, and Sig Arc Work

One of my passions in City of Heroes was creating cutscenes. There were a ton that I did. The ones that I'm most proud of are the death of Statesman, an iconic figure in the game, and the new cutscenes in Issue 24.

The Statesman's Death cutscene was made before we had the technology to do Depth of Field and moving cameras.



The next video is one I made to preview cutscenes for studio-use.. It was a trailer to show off all of the new cutscenes coming in Issue 24. These cutscenes show off the relatively new technology for moving cameras and also depth of field, both which help give the cutscenes a more cinematic feel.





I also enjoy writing scripts in LUA, specifically to enhance gameplay experience. I've included a video to showcase a few of the more showey things that I've done with LUA. The scripts shown are:

- Ally revival script. A designer can attach this script to any entity and specify how long it takes for them to revive after they're defeated. They can define what the entity says when they're defeated and when they get up.
- A teleport to location script with special FX and floater text. Like with the ally revival script, this was written in a generic way to be a one size fits all script. The designer can specify what they want and have it change almost on the fly.
- A kill 1 entity script that kills multiple entities. This also showed off a handy functionality of LUA, which was the instant feedback of things changing on the fly.
- Changing the sky in a map to something else. This was a big breakthrough for City of Heroes, as the only way to do this previously was in code. With this, designers could change things very easily to make more interesting missions.



One of the big projects that we had on City of Heroes were the Signature Story Arcs. This was the "holy grail" for MMO's: putting out content on a monthly basis. It was a monumental task, but we managed to get out 2 new arcs, one for hero side, and one for villain side, on roughly a month by month basis for seven months. The following two videos are interviews that we did, featuring myself, Matt Miller, and David Nakayama.



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