Reckoning

'Reckoning' is the final level in Crysis. I was assigned to the level to mainly do scripting since the geometry was essentially complete, although I had to rework, rebuild and cut sections during my tenure on the level.

The first challenge was to bring life to the Aircraft Carrier. Originally, SmartObjects seemed to be the way forward, but since they were radius-based this meant actions could be started through walls, amongst many other problems. As someone wanting to create almost mini-simulations (at one stage the Mess Hall had Food, HungryGuy, Chair and Table SmartObject classes, with states like Hungry and Full) I quickly came to the realisation that scripted scenes, conversations and actions were not only the correct thing for this game, but that it was infinitely better for players to see a perfectly-animated, well-acted event that was identical every time they played, than a random fumbling real-time one which was always different.

Originally, there was only one Carrier, and during the player's blackout when the Aliens attacked, objects were hidden and unhidden to make the change from a pristine environment to a damaged one. Eventually, as the visual fidelity rapidly expanded it was clear that two versions of the Carrier would have to be created, with players beamed to the destroyed one during the cinematic.
Despite the host of synchronisation issues which popped up due to the evolving nature of the game and the level, it was definitely the correct choice.

Interestingly, when I was assigned to the level, the Nanosuit had not really been designed into the layout of the level, which meant that players could now simply Strength-Jump over barriers and obstacles, and so the entire route players took during the damaged Carrier part of the level had to be drastically changed. Thankfully, since the Carrier was also being used in a Multiplayer map, a lot of it was fleshed-out and there was quite a lot of leeway in terms of blocking off paths and opening new routes.
The main route through the ship was changed again later, since players felt they were trudging through corridors for too long, and so the entire Mess Deck was cut - probably for the best given the cramped, tight nature of the corridors and how difficult this was on the AI.

A lot of navigation aids were also added to the Carrier. In particular, the red light for locked and green light for unlocked doors was a bit of a bugbear to add, but it actually seemed to help players navigate what they felt was a maze and so it was a happy tradeoff. There were also some mild contrivances such as closing doors in areas to stop players getting lost.

Due to the aforementioned cuts, we had to get players down to the Hangar deck without using a route that backtracked through the Control Tower Island and ATC Deck. The best way was the Hangar Elevator which went from the Flight Deck down to the Hangar Bay; perfect. However, we struggled with this so much because it felt unintuitive; who was controlling the elevator? Why would players go in that direction, apart from following the green dot on the radar?
Thankfully, we found a few tricks to help ease this - the Admiral would bark at players to head there, soldiers would spawn from inside the Island and run to the elevator, while others would already be on the elevator riding it up, and a smoke canister particle effect was let off in that area to guide players' eyes further.
It turned out it was something that we worried about and over-thought; in actuality, players didn't seem to mind the contrivance of having to use the Hangar Elevator so much, although pulling out the extra stops definitely helped soften the blow.

We had a lot of difficulty thinking of a proper solution for players jumping overboard when outdoors in this level. Although we hated doing it, a killzone around the Carrier in the water was set up because every other solution was lacking - there were ideas about using ladders, nets, even a rescue helicopter! These were all eschewed in favour of putting players right back into the action if they happened to mess up, rather than making them swim all the way around the Carrier due to the limited number of places ladders could even be placed realistically.

I tried to create and maintain a war ambience through various tricks - indoors, a camera shake gave the illusion of the Carrier tilting, I triggered sounds and weapon items behind walls and locked doors to give off the feeling that small battles were erupting all around players, and tried to fill almost every space with scripted ambience from simple special effects like a fusebox giving up and exploding to larger AI battles.
Outdoors, I would spawn three Alien Scouts and upon spawning, each would randomly select one of three paths and then be shot down after a random delay whereupon the physics engine would take over and they would either go bowling into the deck or tumble, with a huge splash, into the sea.

One small reference I really wanted to get in was a reference to the movie 'Escape from New York'. Upon entering a well-defended area in Engineering, players are greeted with "You're Nomad? You made it... I heard you were dead." which was also a funny conceptual idea about the paradox of respawning in videogames. In actual fact, it was very likely players had died many times by then in the game.