Friendly NPC Scripting

After my asset integration duties had finished up there was the need for additional scripters to be added to the project. Myself and a couple other Liquid employees decided to take on the task of scripting the friendly NPCs through the game. I had never used Unreal's Kismet up to this point, so it would be a great learning experience for me. Over a six month period I ended up scripting and debugging the friendly NPC pathing and combat through two of Damnation's five Acts (levels).

Seen on the left is a video of the friendly NPC pathing I scripted. I did not include any clips of the NPCs in combat due to the fact that their fighting is mostly autonomous, and is not controlled by me.

Spanish Sewers Assets

In my free time I had the opportunity to model and texture the main components of the Spanish Sewers section in the city of Terra Verte. These components consisted of assets such as a T-intersection, L-intersetion, X-intersection, slightly sloped sewer piece, steeper sewer slope, long straight piece, short straight piece, large unique pieces, and a dead-end sewer piece. All of the assets I created were created with modular intention so that they could piece together in a puzzle-like fashion.

I was also fortunate enough to be able to script the friendly NPC character (Jack) through the sewers that I modeled. It was a unique experience: being able to work on two completely different aspects of video game design, and later, seeing them function together in a finished game.

I worked on Damnation for a good 15 months or so (from 10/07 to 12/08). During those months I did a variety of different work such as asset integration, collision creation, the modeling and texturing of my own props, material creation in Unreal III, bug fixing, and friendly NPC scripting. The two main things I did were asset integration and NPC scripting. During asset integration I worked directly with the Art Production Manager at Liquid Development to create and integrate hundreds of the props seen within the game, including buildings, foliage, vehicles, and cinematic props. My last months of production were spent scripting the friendly NPCs through two of the main levels of the game using Unreal III's Kismet. I also created a modular set of sewer assets (sixteen in total) which were my first game assets ever made.