Michael Ammer - Level Designer

Rise of the Hutt Cartel is the first digital expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic. The expansion adds a new planet to the game, new faction storylines, and two new gameplay systems designed to deliver content to players via exploration and discovery.

I was tasked with creating these new gameplay systems, with the stated
goal of breaking from traditional MMO mechanics, and rewarding players
who venture off of the beaten path. The results became known as the Macrobinocular and Seeker Droid systems.

In addition to the systems themselves, I was responsible for designing and scripting the introductory quest lines for each new mechanic. These quests were designed to be full of ambiance and environmental puzzles, to encourage players to problem solve using the new tools they'd been
granted.

(Click any of the images to the right to view the Gallery).

The Seeker Droid is a tool players can use to unearth hidden treasures, quest objects, gear, and even subterranean creatures.

Players choose the spot they wish to dig in, then activate their droid - who is summoned and scans the target location. If something is detected, the droid digs it up, and delivers it to the player. If nothing is found, the droid emits a "hot/cold" style indicator ring around the player, showing him how far he is from the nearest buried object, and a rough directional heading of the object.

The Arcanum is an ancient Sith space station, which is used to house and contain the creatures, weapons, and artifacts deemed too dangerous to be let loose in the galaxy; sort of the Star Wars equivalent of Warehouse 13.

During the Seeker Droid quest line, a rogue Sith Lord named Tagriss raids the Arcanum, stealing many of the dangerous artifacts interred within.

In one of the more memorable sequences of the story, players must pursue Tagriss through the Arcanum - leaping between suspended storage containers, fighting escaped monstrosities, and avoiding the station's flamethrower-equipped "Emergency Purge Droids" that have activated to deal with the crisis.

When players finally track Tagriss down to his lair, they find that he has used the artifacts he stole - The Seeds of Rage - to corrupt and mutate everything around him.

Guarding Tagriss' chambers is a massive Corrupted Sithspawn creature, who can disappear into the black ichor on the ceiling, grapple players with its triple-forked tongue, or sap their life with its subterranean tentacles.

Deep within Tagriss' lair, players find themselves stuck in a frantic holdout situation against a neverending stream of corrupted, ravenous, zombie-like enemies.

Temporarily protected by portable forcefield emitters, players must gather the power cores from around the room and use them to fully power the defense turret generator (far left).

However, while players are doing this, the corrupted troopers continue to batter down the forcefields, steadily weakening them over time. Players must balance using their power cores to charge the generator, while also sacrificing some to maintain the safety of their shields.

When players finally catch up to Lord Tagriss, they find that he has managed to crack open one of the Seeds of Rage, and is using it to infuse himself with almost limitless power.

In a cinematic final showdown, players do battle with Lord Tagriss, who uses his newfound powers to bat players around like flies, open force-crushing black holes, and electrify the flooded room.

To defeat Tagriss, players must activate their Seeker Droids to dislodge the force crystals embedded within the room, and use them to attack the Seed of Rage directly. The resulting explosions temporarily break Tagriss' connection to the Seed, making him vulnerable (albeit briefly).

The Macrobinoculars system allows players to enter a focused, binocular-like view mode which highlights objects of interest. From here, players can scan objects to reveal hidden clues about their environment, progress their quests, or discover new ones altogether.

Lore-wise, the system draws its roots directly from Star Wars, with Luke using a pair to scan his surroundings in Episode IV. Gameplay-wise, the system is open-ended, allowing the Macrobinoculars to trigger a multitude of effects when scanning objects - everything from revealing clues about environmental puzzles, to deciphering hidden messages, to calling in airstrikes on the scanned target.

During the Macrobinocular quest line, players must use the scanning capabilities of their new device to track down and foil a legendary spymaster known only as "The Shroud."

The Shroud is a devious adversary, who delights in designing elaborate traps for his would-be pursuers. On Dromund Kaas, players encounter a seemingly impregnable laser maze guarding one of The Shroud's data centers. However, using their Macrobinoculars, players can find clues in the environment to circumnavigate the obstacles and breach The Shroud's defenses.

Guarding each of The Shroud's datacenters is a unique and fearsome lieutenant in his employ.

Here, players encounter the covert assassin droid, BNK-1: a prototype killer who takes on the guise of a normal protocol droid. When agitated, however, the droid exposes its true purpose - revealing shoulder-mounted missile launchers, palm laser emitters, arm blades, and remorseless assassination protocols.

During one of my favorite moments of the Macrobinocular quest line, players are in hot pursuit of one of The Shroud's lieutenants - who has taken flight in the skylanes of Nar Shaddaa.

Undeterred, players leap from a balcony and are thrust into the midst of a high-speed car chase where they must bound between airspeeders, transports, and starships in order to board the lieutenant's Data Skiff mid-flight.

To make matters worse, The Shroud's personal assassin droid - IR-77 - has been hunting the player, and finally catches up to him atop a speeding transport, thirty stories up...

When players finally come face-to-face with The Shroud, it is a showdown to remember.

The Shroud pulls out all the stops - using personal shield generators, assassin droids, death rays, and holo-duplicates - pushing players to their limits. However, using their wits (and the Macrobinoculars they stole from him) players can overcome all of these obstacles and bring The Shroud down once and for all.

Or so they think...

Star Wars: The Old Republic is the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game from world-renowned developer Bioware. Combining Bioware's signature storytelling with addictive MMO gameplay, SWTOR merges genres to create something truly unique.

My role in the project was that of a World Designer and Scripter. As such, I was tasked with implementing many of the quests within the game - including the entire planet of Alderaan. In addition to Quest Scripting, I was also responsible for creating several of the game's more emergent quest-delivery mechanisms, such as Staged Bonus and Area Quests.

In addition to my normal scripting responsibilities, I was also the Liaison between the Design and VFX departments. My job was to communicate requests, limitations, and schedules between the departments, as well as creating many of the world-design-specific VFX you see in the game.

(Click any of the images to the right to view the Gallery).

Alderaan is the largest, and one of the most content-rich planets within The Old Republic. It is a place of political turmoil, shifting alliances, and native infestation; all set against the backdrop of a gorgeous rocky mountainscape.

As Alderaan's primary scripter, I was responsible for scripting and implementing virtually every quest on the planet, and maintaining the planet through launch and beyond.

While scripting Alderaan, I tried to ensure that each player class's quest chain had at least one "set piece" moment - something epic and befitting of Star Wars. Here, the Sith Warrior leads a contingent of House Organa's troops against an invading army.

While on Alderaan, the Jedi Knight is plagued by an orbital laser known as the "Death Mark." At the planet's conclusion, after the player's victory over the Sith controlling the laser, I added a moment of poetic justice. Instead of simply smashing the Death Mark's control console, the player inputs the console's coordinates as its next target, making the satellite blast itself out of commission.

Scripting memorable boss fights was some of the most fun I had on the project. Here, the despot king of Alderaan - Bouris Ulgo - throws up a forcefield around his throne in order to protect himself.

Players must collect Ulgo's own rocket launchers from the weapons stockpiles around the facility in order to blast the shield generators and bring down his defenses.

On Nar Shaddaa, the Trooper tracks down the stolen Republic war droid M1-4X, only to find it being overcharged by an alien power generator, and reprogrammed to fight for the Empire. Players must use the environmental generators to overload M1-4X's shields, providing brief windows for them to unleash their weapons on the droid.

In order to reward explorers, I worked to create the "Area Quest" system in SWTOR. This system allows for players to discover quests simply by walking into an area, and have objectives and status of the quest updated to them via a probe droid.

Here on Balmorra, Republic players collect parts of a prototype droid scattered throughout a junkyard. Upon rebuilding the droid, it turns on its creators, and it's up to the players to stop it.

This "build-a-boss" setup is dynamic, and the parts the droid is made of is reflective of the parts used to assemble it. There are many different combinations players can use to build the droid, and the droid's abilities and appearance after being assembled are dependent on which parts players have put into it.

My favorite boss fight, hidden away on Alderaan, is the Shellback War Nerf we came to affectionately know as "Scruffy." This seemingly harmless Nerf has been augmented with cybernetics and turbolaser cannons, making it one tough bovine to wrangle.

The skyline over the Balmorran Arms Factory features some of the many VFX I created for the game. Republic and Imperial fighters dogfight ambiently in the sky, large anti-aircraft batteries fire up at them, and the Empire's weapons-disabling beacon tower emits its energy tendrils over the battlefield.

A late addition I made to the game, Jukeboxes were an attempt to make the planetary cantinas more interactive and alive. Players can purchase Jukebox Tokens from bartenders, and use them to select a song of their choice which will be played for everyone in the cantina. Many cantinas offer live bands and holo dancers which accompany the selected track with a dazzling light show.

Another system I created for the game was the NPC-Mounted Turret system. This scripted ability allows for NPCs to mount stationary guns in order to fight enemies. Here, House Organa troops defend a barricade from a swarm of Killiks using mounted turrets.

SWTOR is know for its rich story. In order to make players feel like their stories and choices have impact on the game, I attempted to make the world around them reflect their actions wherever possible.

One example is the Jedi Consular on Alderaan, who finds the compound of House Teral in broken disarray at the beginning of his quest line.

However through the player's work and actions, they can save House Teral, and help it rebuild. This then transforms the place from a battlefield to a sanctuary, and allows players to feel that their choices have weight - even in an MMO.

Dedicated explorers in SWTOR can often find hidden Datacrons dotted throughout the landscape. Certain datacrons contain Matrix Shards which can be combined (via a system I designed and scripted) into rare Matrix Cube artifacts that grant powerful boosts to their stats. The Matrix Cubes that are crafted (and thus the stats that are boosted) are dependent on which shards the player uses to assemble the artifact.

The Asylum is a custom-built Gears of War level that casts the player as a nameles COG Special Operative tasked with recovering the contents and crew of a spy helicopter that crashed in the middle of a pre-war insane asylum.

The design of the level focused heavily upon creating mood and tension through lighting and shadow. As such, custom lightmaps and materials were created to give the interiors of the level an oppresive, dirty feel meant to unsettle the player.

The lighting also influences the gameplay experience, however, as Locust eyes glow red in the darkness, and a custom-scripted flashlight gives the player a narrow cone of view in otherwise pitch-black parts of the level.

Click here to view The Asylum trailer.

(Click any of the images to the right to view the Gallery).

The exterior of the Asylum is ominous and foreboding. Rising smoke hints at the location of the helicopter the player must find, and the low angle of a stark sunset allows for strong shadows within the building.

The player enters the Asylum by dropping through a hole in the roof. This thematically traps the player inside, as he cannot leave the way he came.

After travelling through an eerily quiet wing of the facility, the player makes his way to the Reception Area. The doors to the inner facility are locked, and the power has been cut. The player must then decend into the basement to restore power to the switch here in order to open the door.

The focus on lighting continues in the basement. Once power is restored, strong cell lights project long shadow bars outward, making the player feel as if he a prisoner within the Asylum.

Once the player breaches the inner facility, he enters the grand atrium. This space serves as a transition between the eerie tension of the early level, and the frantic combat of the latter. The filthy windows project their dirt onto everything below, making it hard for the player to see the bood coating many of the surfaces.

The player finds one of the Helicopter's crewmen dead in the atrium, and is immediately ambushed by a squad of Locust.

After escaping the locust, the player enters a hallway looking out into a courtyard within the facility. Here, the downed chopper is revealed for the first time.

After racing against some Wretches to escape the hallway, the player is greeted by the emerging daylight as he arrives at his destination.

Moriarcis is a mod for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. In it, the player discovers a lost underground "City of the Dead," and must unravel its secrets - and those of its creator - before he becomes a permanent resident.

This mod features a host of custom scripted features, such as a fully functional underground city of skeletal NPCs (complete with guards, merchants, inkeeper, etc), two new dungeons, seven new spells, new armors, and fully-posable placeable skeletal mannequins.

The goal of this mod was to create a living, breathing city of dead NPCs. Great care went into crafting the city, with the goal of making it believable and livable, but with a dissonent twist. For example, instead of being built around a tree, Moriarcis is built around a massive stone column riddled with bones. And instead of growing crops, local farmers tend to buried corpses (which are harvestable just like normal Oblivion plants).

Click here to view the Moriarcis trailer.

(Click any of the images to the right to view the Gallery).

In classical mythology, great heroes often had to descend into the underworld at some point in their quest. This crossing was often depicted as a great chasm, or river, or cave.

I wanted the approach to Moriarcis to feel like one of those myths. To do this, I constructed the city's entrance as a narrow bridge surrounded by a bottemless black void.

Everything in Moriarcis has a familiar feel, but with a morbid twist. For example, instead of being built around a massive Oak tree, like the city of Chorrol, Moriarcis is built around a massive stalactite riddled with ancient stones and the bones of the fallen.

The Inner Sanctum of Moriarcis is guarded by Bone Knights, and surrounded by a field of corpses.

Every NPC in Moriarcis has a full daily schedule. Because the skeletal citizens of the city are bound into servitude by their Necromancer lord, they must each pray at his statue every night before retiring to their tombs to rest.

Upon the conclusion of the city's quest line, the player becomes the new lord of Moriarcis, and this statue is replaced with one of his likeness.

Many NPCs within the city have jobs which they actually enact. This blacksmith wields a hammer and slaves at his anvil for all eternity.

Another example of NPC jobs within the city, this skeletal farmer is tending to his crop of corpses. These corpses are actual harvestable containers, just like regular Oblivion plants, and provide Bonemeal and Mortflesh ingredients when collected.

In order to enter the Inner Sanctum, players must pass under a sword arch and confront Moriarcis' Bone Knights.

Upon confronting the Necromancer Lord of Moriarcis, the player is sent deep into the catacombs beneath the city. Here the undead are restless, and attack the player on sight.

Moriarcis features two new armor sets that the player can collect. Each set was made by retexturing and rearranging existing Oblivion armors to create something distinct and unique.

While the city above is creepy enough, the combination of water, fog, and environmental SFX in the catacombs beneath the city make this dungeon feel altogether different.

Complimentary lighting schemes and focal geometry help guide the player to his goal - a magic orb interred deep inside the city's catacombs.

Upon recovering the magic orb, the player is finally allowed to meet Moriarcis' lord face-to-face. He wears the other custom armor set to be found within the mod.

The player is betrayed by the necromancer, and sucked into his mind. This bizarre, hellish landscape is full of nonsensical images, strange playspaces, and other forms of madness.

The items and enemies within the mindscape are all named and themed to represent mental concepts. For example, these enemies are the "Hobgoblins of a Troubled Mind." Other atmosphere-enhancing touches are the healing and mana potions (endorphins and serotonin) the player can find hidden within Synapses that grow around the level.

Before the final confrontation, the player finds himself within a mental sanctuary of sorts. This idyllic landscape is the last bastion of sanity within the Necromancer's mind.

Here, the mental themes continue, as the player can harvest the "Seeds of Inspiration" and "Essense of Resolve" to boost his stats in preparation for the upcoming battle.

After wading through the jungle of the Necromancer's mind, the player finds himself approaching a mental colliseum. This structure is slowly revealed as the player approaches, allowing for tension and anticipation to build within the player.

Stalkers is a single-player Doom 3 map designed to take the most familiar of Doom's monsters - the Imp - and make it actually frighten players again.

The core focus of this level is pacing. Once players are thrust into combat with something, it usually loses its mystique as the player learns he can kill it. Thus, the goal here was to stretch out the anticipation period before the ultimate confrontation, in order to build tension. For the first half of the level, shadows move, doors open by themselves, ceiling grates fall down, and corpses are dragged away around the player, but the assailant is never fully seen.

As the level progresses, however, the player gets closer and closer to his foe. And when contact IS finally made, it is not on his terms. The level then quickly shifts tone from nervous tension to frantic survival, as the player must race to the escape elevator while being chased by not one, but an entire nest of Imps.

(Click any of the images to the right to view the Gallery).

As the player enters the level, he is greeted by the grim and shadowy atmosphere of the dank maintenance corridors. Some of the first unsettling moments in the level come when the shadows projected on these walls move on their own, or seem to have something crawling within them.

As the player makes his way through the tunnels, he finds everyone dead, and much of the machinery broken. He must often find a way to repair this machinery in order to progress deeper into the level.

Keeping the player in these spaces for a bit of time to solve a puzzle allowed me to craft unsettling moments as he moved around. For example, when the player first enters this room, there are corpses everywhere. The player then rounds a corner to grab a part to repair the door, and when he returns, the corpses are gone, but trails of blood lead up walls, around the ceiling, and through the door the player must now go through.

As Doom III uses a Radiant, BSP style of level construction, all of the machinery within the facility had to be hand-crafted from scratch. These machines were then scripted to move and animate as the player repaired them - giving the level a sense of character and life.

A detailed shot of one of the many ambient machines operating throughout the level.

As the level grows tenser, the player makes his way through a decontamination zone. This is one of the few machines still functional in the level, and activates when the player enters. The player is then trapped while he is scanned and sterilized. However, during the process he can hear things moving in the walls all around him. Just before the decontamination sprayers fire, a ceiling grate drops and the player catches his first glimpse of what's hunting him.

The passageway on the far side of the Decontamination Room offers little comfort. It looks as if the team tried to make a last stand here, and didn't survive.

The player must then explore the overrun security guard station in order to find an access key to enter the next level of the facility.

Here the player must walk through large, loud, moving machines that ambiently pump and spin, constantly shifting the shadows and sounds in the room. Throughout this cacophony the player can hear Imps hissing, and see them crawling in the walls. Or was that just a shadow moving?

After the player has made contact with the Imps, he races to the emergency lift access corridor. Unfortunately, this room is a perfect Imp nesting ground with its large twisting pipes and machinery. The Imps could come from anywhere - and they do. As the player fights his way to the exit, they climb down the pipes from above, emerge from the grating below, and burst out of walls to prevent his escape.

When the player reaches the exit, he summons the elevator, and must survive the final wave of Imps before it arrives. Angered, they begin clawing through doors and making new entrances for themselves, all in an attempt to prevent the player's escape.

Relativity is a quirky 2D puzzle platformer with a 'twist.' The player takes on the role of Albert Einstein who, in a fit of mathematics, has been sucked into a chalkboard world of his own equations.

The central gameplay mechanic in Relativity is that the world's gravity is always relative to Einstein's feet. This means that if Einstein jumps and touches the ceiling, gravity is inverted for himself, and anything else in the game world. This allows for players to run, jump, and fall in all directions, as well as make enemies do the same.

The enemies and environments of the chalkboard world are drawn right from Einstein's own theorems. From "problem variables" such as flying Omega symbols that drop Alpha bombs, to puzzles that use math and gravity to create traversible platforms, Relativity is a game like no other.

(Click any of the images to the right to view the Gallery).

Relativity's mechanics are fairly simple, but communicating them to an unsuspecting player may not be. To solve this, we made clever use of the chalkboard environment to leave tutorial messages and hints for the player as notes that Einstein had left for himself.

Because gravity can go two ways, it can often be difficult for players to know which jumps are safe and which aren't. To signal this, we came up with the "eraser smudge" visual cue. Players quickly learn that nothing lies beyond areas that have been erased, and to thus avoid jumping into them.

Designing and propping these levels was extremely fun. To add a bit of depth to the 2-D world, we took images of many of Einstein's papers and inserted them as game objects. Players can then run on top of or behind these papers as part of the level geometry.

Many of the puzzles within the game combine simple platforming with rudimentary mathematics. For example, in this puzzle, players must jump onto the the underside of the "minus" line that has fallen out of place. Once it is back into its proper place in the equation, the line of the graph is reversed, allowing players to progress.

The player can often find silly doodles Einstein made while trying to solve his mathmatical quandries.

Here the player leaps between two chalk triangles. The player can change the angles of the triangles' corners elsewhere, which in turn changes the shape of the platforms he can jump between.

During my personal favorite section of the game, Einstein is chased "Indiana Jones" style by a giant rolling Theta boulder. Since world gravity changes with Einstein's direction, Theta follows the player as he jumps between floors and ceilings throughout the chase.

As the player breathes a sigh of relief (having narrowly escaped from Theta), he also gets a chuckle looking at Einstein in his beach outfit.