LUCAS PEJOUX - LEVEL DESIGNER
Destroy all Humans! 2 - Reprobed
Destroy all Humans! 2 - Reprobed is a remake of the original game released in 2006. It is an open world game with a lot of varied type of quests - over 70 in total. In this remake we particularly improved the quality of those said quests which were very repetitive in the original game.
Responsibilities
I joined the Black Forest Games team in order to design all the gameplay content of the Challenge Accepted! DLC which would feature the fan favorite challenges of the previous remake.
The DLC would contain 35 of these challenges which are snippets of gameplay varying between 1.30 and 3 minutes.
There was 4 types of challenges: Abduction, Armageddon, Race, and Rampage.
The Abduction challenges focuses on the PsychoKinetic mechanics, the Armageddon focuses on the flying saucer mechanics, the Race focuses on the traversal mechanics, and the Rampage is focusing on combat mechanics.
Except the Armageddon which goes over the whole map in one challenge, had to create two challenges of each type per world, which makes 35 challenges in total for the DLC.
For most of them, especially in the early worlds (Bay City, Albion and Takoshima) I was only responsible for finding suitable areas and gameplay ideas to fit in.
On the later worlds, I had more leeway and collaborated more with the artists and world designers, for example, I made them create a colliseum like arena because I wanted something bigger for what was the last challenge of the game, which was designed as a special snowflake where the players would experience every weapon and mechanics one last time.
The Armageddon challenge, the one that asks the player to play with the saucer, was the one I reworked the most.
Indeed, in the first remake, this challenge could become boring and not as destruction focus as it should've been with it's secondary objectives - which were using a PsychoKinetic ability on certain vehicles target.
Therefore I had to rework it and involve more those secondary objective in the power fantasy of destroying everything. So I prototyped a version where some vehicles would drop a nuke bomb on destroyed, which was instantly loved among the team.
So in the newest version, the player feels like an alien overlord destroying everything while scoring the most efficiently in the challenge!
With each of those 35 challenges, I had to go through some balancing pass, analyzing the values of internal playtest sessions.
This work also allowed me to do some dressing when dressign objects would interfere with gameplay.
I also had to take over and override some of the world designer's navigation system to create some special situations for the challenges.
