Thunder Tier One is a realistic top-down shooter game set in the 90’s, where you play as an elite special operations team. I’ve had the pleasure and honor of being part of this project and working with a small but very talented and passionate team.

The world of Thunder Tier One

I was responsible primarily for the Level Design and Environment Art in Thunder Tier One.

Thunder missions should be suitable for different aproaches, from stealth to all guns blazing. Players are also able to take equipment such as fiber optic cameras, wire cutters, lock pickers and other items like this to exploit the level objects. All of these things had to be taken into consideration when designing each level.

TTO #1

I was able to work super close to our engineers and get a good grasp of all the systems in the game. Having this knowledge allowed me to do much of the level logic setup for our levels from AI spawners, triggers, and setting up other multiplayer gamemodes such as Deathmatch, Advance And Secure and Exfil.

A destructible environment

We wanted the world to feel real and chaotic, featuring a decent degree of destruction in the environment. I was tasked with creating all destructibles using Houdini and UE4. It was no simple task but the result was quite satisfying to experience once in the game.

TTO #2

Exfil

I designed and pitched the multiplayer Exfil gamemode. A 2 team round based gamemode, where 1 side tries to extract a container of hazardous material out of the battlefield while the other tries to stop them. Exfil points are dynamic every round and players make use of TTO’s unique mechanics to play such as UAV and gadgets. Teams swap roles at half time, and the team with most rounds wins the match.

TTO #4

It’s heavily inspired by Counter-Strike gamemodes (which I’m a fan of) and offered a lot of replay value. I had a blast seeing people play through the various iterations and I’m happy that it made the final game.

So many things to do!

During development I also tapped into many other things outside my field, from designing systems such as Player Progression, Contracts, Item drops, UI and other things.

It was an incredibly valuable experience to work on this game and explore so many things out of my confort zone. I’m glad I was given an oportunity to do this much, and I am so proud of how it all turned out.

TTO #3

The game did extremely well on release having an almost “Overwhelmingly Positive” score for the first months on Steam. I could have not have asked for a better release.