For the past 5 years or so I have been developing my skills as a level designer for Elite Force 1. With our latest map having only just being released with RPG-X2 our total is now well over 25 maps created and released. More recently we’ve been looking to branch out into other games but those projects have yet to start. It’s been a rough ride from starting off as newbie’s 5 or so years ago in an already slightly ageing game to becoming the top developers in the RPG Mapping community. It’s very rewarding when people e-mail us or stop to speak to us online and compliment us on our work, that’s not to say we still don’t get people offering suggestions for future releases.

Our maps in Elite Force have become gradually more complicated over the course of time and our most recent map the “Uss Atlantis” has the most advanced features of any map currently released. It’s been a real nightmare trying to work on that map, constantly being harassed by errors and delays have meant that the map has taken the longest to develop out of all of our maps. It’s funny to think in 2005/6 we were developing and releasing maps every few months and some maps had turnarounds of less than a week!

I’ve also become quite accomplished in 3DS Max in the last few years and many of our trailers utilise 3D Animations of the ship in space. Its fun to add renders of the outside of the map, it allows us to kind of visualise what we’re walking around in. Of course I’ve also had to become skilful in Photoshop to create the textures for our maps, the right textures in a map will really make it special. Too many times I’ve seen what could be good maps ruined by the use of ‘stock’ low quality textures and LCARS.

Speaking of LCARS, one of my proudest moments was when I finished work on the Master Systems Display for the Poseidon B map (MSD for short). The MSD took a few weeks to create and has a complete cutaway diagram of the entire ship and nacelles.

All in all I’ve done too much in the last few years to warrant me rambling on for pages and pages, suffice to say I’ve enjoyed what we’ve done in the past and I look forward to our programming, web and mapping projects in the future.