| NICK.MOHILCHOCK Designer | ||||||||||||
| Trinity - Last Updated: August 1, 2010 Checksum... OK | ||||||||||||
My very first job at Gray Matter Studios as a junior designer was working on the ill-fated first-person shooter Trinity. For the many that probably don't know, Trinity was Gray Matter's attempt at a new intellectual property under the Activision label. I had started working on the title in June of 2003, but by October the project was cancelled, due to a number of marketing and business-related issues. It was shortly after this that I started working on Call of Duty: United Offensive, but that is a story for later. I was in charge of three levels while working on Trinity: Riverside Hospital (1 & 2) and The Swamp. Riverside Hospital was a creepy abandoned medical facility that was used as a front for bringing in bodies that had been experimented on, and beneath which lay an underground complex where specimens were preserved and stored. For the first part of the mission, players toured the hospital trying to find the entrance to the underground labs. Often there would be a security guard or mechanical drone roaming the hallways to keep people on their toes. After reaching the second half of the mission, the facility is crawling with guards set up to ambush players making their escape.
As for The Swamp, players waded waist-deep through tall grasses and alligators to bring down a vicious bayou crime boss with vital information on the experiments happening to the innocent people throughout the city. Thugs and snipers in tree tops were around every bend, and an explosive battle with the crime boss ended the level on an action-packed boat chase to a refinery (not pictured - cut from the game).
I made a lot of mistakes during my first project - in particular with The Swamp. Since I had never worked on a single-player level with constraints that were dependent on story, I had a difficult time working within those constraints to make the environment challenging and exciting. Instead, I relied on adding a number of set piece items that ended up detracting from the experience of being in a "swamp", in favor of gameplay that was much easier to set up. I over-cluttered the world with lots of house boats, docks, bridges, vehicles, and other man-made structures. There were a lot of hazards and gameplay opportunities to be had with the opaqueness of the water and floating foliage that I didn't think to take advantage of, which were big oversights on my part. Hindsight is always 20/20 I suppose, and I learned a lot from the experience. Back to top | ||||||||||||
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