Portfolio / Game Design & Direction / Stealth & Interaction Design
02 · STEALTH
Stealth and disguise rules you can read at a glance.
On HITMAN, I designed and prototyped stealth and disguise mechanics, from crouching behind obstacles and avoiding guard or camera vision to disguises and level patterns with secret passageways.
THE CHALLENGE
Stealth, disguise and trap mechanics had to be understood, tested and placed by level designers in levels of rising difficulty.
WHAT I DID
Designed and prototyped the mechanics, built in-game showrooms in Glacier 2 to test and communicate them, and wrote one-page schematics for the team.
THE RESULT
A shared reference for the whole team: one-page overviews of the disguise rules, a trap decision aid and the full emergent tampering system.
In-game showrooms
Built in-game showrooms using the Glacier 2 engine and its node-based scripting to test and communicate mechanics tied to the stealth feature, placed into level patterns with increasing complexity and difficulty.
Disguise rules
Created simple schematics explaining the core rules of the disguise gameplay, and one-pagers showing a level designer how to use the different difficulty stages when implementing the feature in a level pattern.
World interactions as flow charts
Designed and evolved world interaction systems such as traps, distractions, doors and gates. One-page schemes make a whole category of mechanics legible at a glance, showing how a single rule template scales across many interactive objects without new logic.
Reading a trap before you place it
A decision aid for level designers placing traps, made to help them judge how complex a trap is to trigger against the difficulty of the surrounding level before committing it.
The tampering system on one page
The master overview of the emergent tampering system, designed to give the whole team a shared reference for how tampering fits together.