Contents

• Liandri High (Unreal Tournament 2004 Level)
• Zimri’s Seal - Ismeldara’s Dream (NWN Module)

Liandri High

The site of a famous hostage situation where a single miner rescued his children from dometic terrorists, killing them all, but none of the children, this high school, including the gym, some classrooms, and locker rooms, are being used by the Liandri Corporation for more gritty, yet less exotic, deathmatches.

The goal of creating this level was to have a single, limited, defining concept, and execute it in a more refined manner than previous efforts. For a previous course project, I had made a level much too large, which left me unable to populate the explorable area with much interesting stuff in the time I had. Starting with a sketch of an angular spiral, I decided that the central area was a high school gym, and the arms were classrooms.

Download the UT2004 Map

Zimri’s Seal

Click here to download the Neverwinter Nights Module

For this project, which was a game interpretation of a larger story that was provided to us, I was producer and lead designer. We were only six people strong, but we were divided into art, technical, and design teams. The art team transitioned into the QA team late in the project when art was locked down. The course was not only about making the game, but also figuring out how to organize ourselves beyond the roles assigned to us by our instructor. Initially I was Assistant Producer and a member of the design team, but two promotions later, I was both producer and lead designer. And, though not a part of the tech team, I wrote over 95% of the scripting used in the final game.

To quote the final summary from our instructor, Jeannie Novak,

“Overall, this is one of the finest, if not the finest, final submissions I’ve seen for this class. Its success lies not only in all the technical problems you set up for yourselves and then more than solved, but in the overall attention to every detail of the game. Sometimes art is an attempt to create artificial life because fine works of art breathe with a life and presence of their own. They have come to exist apart from their creator. Electronic games are an art form and they seethe with the potential for this life of their own. You’ve really taken the tools and the time you had to work with and crossed that mysterious barrier.”