Rockstar Games 2013
I was a scripter on Grand Theft Auto 5, tasked with one heist from the open world game and Trevor’s rampages.
The Merryweather Heist: Freighter:
In this mission, the three playable characters steal something from a heavily guarded ship by placing explosives on the ship, blowing it up, and using a sub to raid the sunken ship. One of the main challenges in scripting this mission is that during the sequence where bombs are placed on the ship, the player can switch any time at will from the character placing bombs on the ship (Michael) to the character sniping from a bridge overlooking the ship (Franklin). If the player switches, the script now needed to control the other character, smartly tracking where that character was and what he should be doing, while keeping the player feeling like they were the star.
Merryweather Heist Gameplay:
https://youtu.be/ORn4Xc5w3Hg
Rampages
In the rampages the player fights randomly spawning waves of enemies, from rednecks to the military. The challenge in writing the scripts was creating a system to spawn enemies efficiently and smartly. The rampages would start in a specific location, but nothing was really stopping the player from moving far away, so enemies would need to be potentially spawned anywhere. The script would find spawn points always out the player’s sight and would try to place them in interesting places such as behind cover or on a rooftop. Enemy vehicles could also spawn in transporting the enemies to near where ever the player may be. Finding spawn points, and the spawning itself were both computationally expensive and would be performed on alternate ticks. The result was a quick burst of frenetic and challenging action.
Rampage Gameplay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnG14dmnmAA
Ryan Pendant - Level / Game Designer 