The Exterior Tileset Tool was a collaboration between two Programmers, two Designers, and two Artists (one of which being me of course). It was designed to create massive amounts of content very quickly, and all without the traditional bottlenecks between Art and Design.

    With the Tileset Tool a Designer can literally 'draw' out a city in a matter of minutes, complete with elevation changes, waterfronts, piazzas, trees, parked cars, phone booths, and bus stops, etc. This city layout can be dropped into the Unreal Engine and a Designer can further refine things from there.

    I worked on everything from modeling the actual ground-plane Tile geometry, to the Tiles with elevation changes, came up with the system of rotations, positioning, and spacing for all the buildings on all the Tiles, placed all the proxy-buildings on all the Tiles which could later be swapped out for final art, and many other elements of the Tileset. (detailed description below ↓)

    The TileSet Tool represents Interaction Design in a variety of ways, from how the tools themselves work to the end product they create. The goal was to create a Massively Multi-Player Game for Sony Online Entertainment involving millions of players simultaneously interacting via the game-medium. In order to create such an environment for the players, the developers of the game (ie the Designers, Programmers, and Artists) needed to work collaboratively to create large game play spaces. Traditional meetings, emails, etc. simply did not provide enough support-structure to allow for game development on such a massive scale, and hand building levels from scratch was financially unrealistic. Because of these two major factors tools and infrastructure were required to facilitate the production environment. The tools had to provide a simple and quick work-flow that allowed for easy editing and iteration. The game levels that the tools created needed to be easily shared between the Art and Design teams. The levels themselves had to be fun and memorable, stay within the PlayStation 3's hardware performance limitations, and the art assets (buildings, streets, cars, interiors, exteriors, etc) had to be completely reusable modular art-pieces which would also look like unique city spaces to the final game player.

    The original idea of building some sort of tool came from the extremely large time requirements necessary to hand build game levels, where a Designer would have to place every single building, street, archway, and interior by hand and an Artist would have to place every single car, door, lamp, tree, etc by hand. The Designers would lay out the outdoor and indoor spaces with rough geometry, hand them off to the Artists, and the Artists would spend weeks building the space as custom one-off levels. There was very little interaction between the teams, each level was unique, and there were no standards or measurements that everyone adhered to.

    And so a multi-disciplinary team of two Programmers, two Designers, and two Artists (of which I was one) set out to build a suite of tools to address all the problems experienced in our production pipeline. The end 'customer' was the Design team who created the requirements for the tools, but the tools were to be developed by the Programmers and the content (buildings, streets, cars, exteriors, etc) was all created and maintained by the Art team. The results of this effort were the TileSet tools. When they were complete, these tools were so fast to use that multiple people could sit at a single computer and design levels together, making changes and iterating quickly. The TileSet tools were so simple to use that non-Designers could learn them easily and build entire cities. The tools took care of many of our production problems for the user because performance, aesthetic choices, grid measurements, and design principles had all been considered when the tools were built. We did a side-by-side time comparison where a Designer took one of his hand-made levels and recreated it with the TileSet. It originally took two months to make by hand and was recreated in the TileSet Tools in a few short hours.

    My main areas of focus were on the aesthetics, measurement systems, and performance requirements behind the art assets that populated the Tileset. On the artistic side I came up with how our street system worked which created a wide range of visual variation and approximated a more European style of city streets (A)↓. From a technical aspect I came up with the building measurements, configurations of groups of buildings on street tiles, and the angles and distances of the buildings on the street tiles (B)↓. The levels created with this tool had to fit within our memory footprint on the PS3, and so I worked with our engineers to learn how we would load-balance the game. The two major things that came out of this were how often we would reuse buildings already loaded in system memory (B)↓ and that the shortest our buildings could be was four stories, which helped limit the player's view of the city and thus limit the number of art assets displayed on the screen (C)↓. Finally, I populated the street tiles with 'proxy' buildings, which formed the back-bone for how the TileSet was going to work. These proxy buildings were not final high quality art assets, but instead were mathematically correct buildings that were built using accurate measurements and correctly placed on the street tiles (D)↓. This was done so that later on Artists could make final high quality buildings using the proxy buildings as guides. Also, this meant that Designers could start making cities immediately. Over time the proxy buildings would get replaced with final quality buildings, but the Designers did not have to wait the weeks and months it took for the Art team to make these final buildings. The TileSet Tools would draw out cities regardless of whether the buildings were gray proxies or finished art assets.

    The reason I chose to show this tool is that it demonstrates my abilities to work in a group, that I can compromise and help make decisions that achieve the goals of the group, I have the technical capacity to solve multi faceted problems, and it is an actual product that has been used in a real world production environment.

    (A) Top-down diagram of all the street configurations for the TileSet where the black lines represent the street or road and each square represents a full city block or street tile.

    A top-down image of a single street tile shows that on any city block a road can connect to one of two 'connection points' per side.

    (B) Top-down diagram showing some of the spaces our buildings would occupy (colored areas) which were used to determine how much physical space the buildings needed to fill, how often would groups of buildings repeat themselves, and the angles the buildings would need to be placed at so they would fit on the street tiles properly. Later, 'proxy buildings' were made to fit these colored areas.

    (C) The image below shows the player's viewing angle horizontally (left) and vertically (right)

    (D) Below are the gray proxy buildings that players could enter. The rest of the colored buildings were non-enterable, but instead acted like bookends to keep the proxy buildings lined up.