I collaborated across disciplines in order to build and maintain multiple systems to build the ambient life in the open world city of Santo Ileso.
Here are some highlights:
- Acted as the main knowledge base for ambient world spawning, gang spawning, vignettes, stimulus reactions, and roadblock systems
- Created visualizations of NPCs and Vehicles to ensure ease of pipeline for assets going into Saints Row
- Created over 100 instances of open world content alongside open world designers and level designers in order to populate the world of Santo Ileso
Here are the systems that I overlooked During the development of Saints Row:
1. Vignettes
2. Roadblocks
3. Spawn Profile & Spawn Limits
4. Stimulus Reaction System
5. Gang Spawning
6. Weather/Ambient Critters
Vignettes
Vignettes are smaller, procedurally generated scenes placed across the city of Santo Ileso.
Roadblocks
Roadblocks are very similar to vignettes but are spawned along the road. There are ambient (civilian) and notoriety (police and faction combatant) variants of these roadblocks.
I created and added many for the city's "Surge State," where Marshall, a security company, puts the city into a military security state. Here are some of the different permutations of checkpoints I made:
Spawn Profile & Spawn Limits
The Spawn Profile is a list of Parameters that dictates the qualitative features of a district. The Limits are a list that dictates the quantities of a district.
Above is a culmination of the spawn profile and limits at work to create the district. The financial sector is full of businesspeople commuting between jobs and getting food. Along the road we can see luxury vehicles, news vans, SUVs and taxicabs.
Stimulus Reactions
Stimulus Reactions are animations, audio, and actions that NPCs do in response to an event in the world. I was responsible for identifying events that required stimulus responses & hooking up
Gang Spawning
Gang spawning refers to all factions & police that spawn throughout the city.
I was responsible for adjusting the ambient waves of gangs, and adjusting gang population based on the player's completion of open world content (I.E as the player takes over more territory, the lower the gang population)
Critter Spawning
I worked with VFX, tweaking our ambient weather system to spawn pigeons and Vultures throughout the city.