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It's been nearly a decade and I still feel weird playing this level. It's two years' worth of memories I can get through in about fifteen minutes. I talk about working on this game a lot, but it's hard to articulate what it meant to work on it. So here's some more reminiscing!
Fun fact: the reason that this path jags so hard to the left is that it was originally planned (in the earliest stages) to branch here and let you choose to go left or right. To the left would be the route that exists now, and to the right would be a vehicle section that got cut.
I'm still simultaneously proud of and kind of embarrassed by this hill encounter. It's the single most overdesigned thing I made encounter-wise with the smallest amount of player-facing impact. I like the pacing though, and I think the marine scripting was alright! Oh well!
This cave encounter is probably the second-most overdesigned thing, just because I was psyched to get to work with the entire sandbox for the first time in the game, so there are weapons all over the place (too many railguns!).
In the category of things that were very close to death numerous times comes this tank run. Memory-wise it was a killer. So many moving parts, so many BSPs... I'm very fortunate that I wasn't murdered by multiple teams because of this run. But I still like it!
Another fun fact: originally there were supposed to be big open doors that led into an open Infinity hangar here, but memory was so tight here we needed a space to unload the outside geometry to make it possible for the interior geo to load. So this cargo lift was born!
Hey, the Mantis run! I love this vignette. This was the first piece of custom content I ever pitched and when it was done it was so cool that I spent all day just watching it over and over from all kinds of angles and geeking out over it.
And then there's the Mantis run and the final encounter. This encounter was already sketched out by the time I inherited the level from another designer, but expanding it and adding the AI-controlled guns to the last encounter was the first thing I ever pitched to leadership.
This last part was super fun to make but getting the MAC to work was a pain and I still don't think it looks right because I screwed up last minute! But the ships crashing and spinning here was done entirely through script and not custom animation, which I think is pretty neat.
