Warframe: The Old Peace
The Old Peace is an expansion for the long-running third-person shooter Warframe. My responsibilities included blocking out and iterating on spaces, scripting custom interactable objects, and working directly with environment art.
After shipping 1999, which was set in a city on Earth, the Warframe team pivoted to making an expansion in a completely different environment: a moon in another solar system. In addition, we decided to pursue a more arcade-like structure, pushing players to complete as many objectives in a limited amount of time. With this direction, work on the new game mode The 12-Minute War began.
Fragments
At the beginning of working on the expansion, we were given a tight time frame, and were looking to reuse old assets from prior areas. My lead, Ben, assigned me to experiment with using spaceship assets from an established faction, the Grineer, to create interesting play spaces.
I immediately thought of how I could use ship fragments to shape the player’s path, having them go under, on top of, and through pieces of wreckage in order to get from one side to the other. I started iterating on this theme, and created a few interesting rough spaces. Eventually, Ben picked one of these out as the most interesting: a space where a crashed ship divided the area in half.
Changing Shape
Once we decided on this particular level, art gave a lot of feedback about the shape of the space, saying that many of the areas were unsculpted and needed definition. The artist whom I’d eventually work with, Frank Trzcinski, showed me concept art that was inspiring him, which gave us the idea of having the shipwreck smashed into the side of a mountain, the player being able to enter through its dormant rocket cones.
Moving the ship carcass from the center to the periphery also created a great landmark in the tile, which I emphasized by reshaping the level around it. I changed the exterior area to have three main “lanes”, one for each rocket burner, and splayed them out so that they’d point back to the main wreckage.
Art Input
The environment artist I worked with, Frank, had a huge impact on the level. We worked together to push the narrative of the space, emphasizing the middle lane as having been dug out from the ship crashing into the environment, and adjusting the cliff face on the left in order to make the ship’s path seem plausible. Frank also iterated on a number of elements in the level, like replacing the rock pillar splitting the middle and right lanes with a half-buried ship wing, making the level feel more grounded and unified in its theme of wreckage.
Ignition
Frank also provided inspiration for another element: he told me excitedly about the TV series Alien: Earth where, in the first episode, a spaceship crashes to earth. One of the of the rockets can be seen intermittently sputtering, and Frank thought it would be a cool piece of VFX to incorporate. I wanted to go further, though, by putting it directly in the hands of players.
Getting this working required me to push my skills with Lua scripting further, but pretty soon I had a working prototype of the interactable in the scene. Players were able to activate any of the three rockets via a console, and deal a ton of fire damage to enemies.
The idea went through a few iterations: having one console control all three burners, each burner having their own console, adding an indicator for the remaining “fuel”. Eventually it caught the eye of our creative director, Rebecca Ford, in a review meeting, and she asked to have it incorporated as an objective in one of the quests for The Old Peace. One code refactoring later, and it was up and running!
