CITIES XL
Game / Level Designer
April 2008 / June 2010 Scroll down for a list of tasks. Developer Monte Cristo Games (France) Publisher Focus Home Interactive Release date October 8, 2009 Platforms PC Engine In-house engine. Genre City Builder. Metacritic 69% Official website http://www2.citiesxl.com/ Official description Imagine and conceive cities of all types and sizes on Cities XL planet. From a several million citizens megalopolis to a hyped seaside resort, to an industrial city, everything is allowed in Cities XL! Take advantage of an incredible collection of more than 700 buildings and structures, 47 different types of maps featuring realistic environments. Enjoy never seen before freedom in a city-builder! As a virtual mayor, find the right balance between economic development of your cities, attractiveness, transportation (road traffic, bus, metro...), pollution, social services, taxes and even leisure activities. For the first time in this kind of game, Cities XL finally lets you go beyond the simple creation of a city! Connect every city that you build in a trade network, specialize some of them so that they can provide for others, thus creating a large-scale economy balance. |
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TASKS
Game Design
- Gameplay of buildings in-game: housing, industries, services, roads, zonings... More than 800.
- Creation of special and thematic buildings for particular gameplays.
- Creation of cheat buildings for internal testing.
- Writing of design documents for designers and spec documents for programmers.
- Follow-up of game design changes, and ensuring cohesion between features.
Level Design
- Addition of life to the buildings thanks to real time animations.
- Setting up of mechanisms with the home tool to easy interactions between the game components (buildings, vehicles, pedestrians...).
- Creation of usable files for the game engine by cooperating with the graphic team and the programming team.
- Placement of natural resources on single and multiplayer maps (60 maps total).
- Reconstitution of real cities (Paris, New York, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro).
Scripting
- Design and scripting of single player tutorials in LUA.
- Scripting of buildings unlocks, achievements, feedbacks and alerts in LUA.
Localization
- Writing of nearly all texts in-game in French and English.
- Direct collaboration with German translators for the German localization.
- Scripting my own work tool and exporter with Excel, with dictionaries, duplicates watcher, empty fields alert, and word/letter counting.
- As of early 2010, the exporter had more than 138,000 words and 900,000 letters.
2D Graphics
- Profile pictures for all buildings and maps.
- Pictures for interface components.
- Marketing and promotional screenshots.
Other
- Follow-up of tasks and team members progress (Waiting for being officially promoted to Lead Level Designer, which never happened because of the shut down of the company).
- Forecasting, reflexions and analyzes on real life systems and other tycoon games.
