Pirate Colony

Pirate Colony is the first level I designed for Uncharted 4 and became the testbed for the rope swing mechanics, the new traversal feature of this game, which was uniquely challenging because the actual mechanics of the rope swing didn’t work at this point in development. So every rope swing position was theoretical during the initial blockmesh phase. It wasn’t until months later when I was able to fine tune these rope swings and get them to be just right.

I also spent a lot of time scripting the event storm on this level to be just right. I always love “special events” that happen during gameplay and in previous games I have worked on these were events like a massive snow storm kicking up mid-match obscuring visibility. I wanted Pirate Colony to go from a completely dry sunny day to a tropical rain storm randomly during a match. Something like this wasn’t possible in previous games, but Uncharted 4 was the first game I worked on that was using physically based shaders, which meant I could use a script I wrote to mask out the dry-shader layer with a wet one. Then it became a small task of inventing a way to turn on rain during gameplay without a noticeable render pop and no programming support. A trick I will hold onto until my dying day . . .or a GDC talk one day.

This level is very special because it combined my love of design, lighting, and visual effects. Special thanks to Mark Shoaf, the lighting artist, for the hundreds of iterations to get it looking beautiful and be in performance, storm and all.