Gears of War: Whiskey Squad - Single Player Level Now Available

[scott4]

The initial release of Gears of War: Whiskey Squad is now available for download.

It's a single player level with four combat encounters. Play time 20-30 minutes.

Interested to hear feedback from everyone, on both the level itself as well as the website presentation.

Check it out here: http://goo.gl/Ty5bO

Thanks!

- S

[Algor]

Hey Scott,

Welcome to Mapcore! I only have Gears for 360 so the best I could do was watch your video. Looks like a nice piece of work, especially hearing so many horror stories about the Gears editor being one of the most unstable! I thought it was a bit contrived to start in the pool only to read one of your documents saying we end up there after a helicopter crash. An important bit of context . Your encounters seemed to have good variety both spatially and pacing wise. Had your validated some of your design decisions with other playtesters? Specifically the melee intro, charging perpendicular across a combat zone to get ammo, or general navigation? It may have also been hard to follow with some of the video editing after connecting back to the main lobby but I don't know why it was necessary to get back there. That may have been one of the encounters you cut. I also thought the final encounter could have been a bit more climactic and be spent fighting enemies that are between the player and the exit, rather than 180 degrees from the exit. That would make the objective very obvious and integrate the fictionally weak objective "kill everyone before leaving". It always brings a tear to my eye to see more SP content.

[scott4]

Thanks for replying, nice to hear from a fellow Seattleite.

Playtesters seemed to understand the melee intro and initial ammo grab with no problems, and seemed to really enjoy the combat encounters in general. People got really invested and in particular played the Common Room and the Courtyard in many different and surprising ways.

For navigation, a number of visual cues had to be changed or removed because testers found them confusing. For instance, it's established early that "rubble = impassable", but later I'd used a rubble mesh as a platform towards an exit, which confused testers.

Your guess is correct, the lobby loop back is to service one of the cut combat encounters. The issue of the courtyard gate is probably not clear due to unimplemented character dialog, which conveys that the area must be cleared before rescue can safely approach.

I'm not opposed to adding this additional content, just wanted to get an initial response from the community, and the current build seemed like a good stopping point for a v1.0. Thankfully the response so far has been pretty positive overall.

Thanks for the thoughtful and very useful feedback!

- S