Age of Conan

Age of Conan (2008 – 2013)

Age of Conan – Hyborian Adventures (2008)
Age of Conan – Rise of the Godslayer (2010)
Age of Conan – Unchained (2011)
Age of Conan – The Savage Coast Of Turan (2011)
Age of Conan – The Secrets of Dragon’s Spine (2013)
http://www.ageofconan.com

Age of Conan is an online MMORPG set in the universe of Robert E. Howard’s character Conan the Barbarian.

I worked on Age of Conan from 2008 to 2013 in Oslo and Montreal, in a variety of roles, including BCC Designer, Animation Systems Designer and AI Designer. I hooked up new character models, rigs and animations to the game’s event-driven state-machine (which I also maintained), created particle effects and visual effects scripts, participated in GFX reviews of new monsters and animations, fixed skinning on character equipment, created some animations for characters, and more.

Below you’ll find some bulletpoints highlighting some of the work I’ve done on this project, as well as some screenshots (at the bottom).

AI Design & Scripting:

Designed and created scripts for AI monsters (combat), NPCs (quests/cutscenes), dungeons (boss-encounters,dungeon events) and world events in Secrets of the Dragon’s Spine adventure pack/expansion. The scripts were created using Funcom’s proprietary visual scripting tool – Scry
Co-designed and scripted boss-encounters for the 6-player dungeon Coils of Ubah Kan in the Secrets of Dragon’s Spine adventure pack/expansion (Shadow Spider Matriarch, The Unknown, Serpent Man Hierophant, Serpent Man Grand Vizier, Serpent Man Omni Prophet,
Co-designed, implemented and fine-tuned the final boss-encounter of the Crawling Chaos quest-line in Secrets of Dragon’s Spine adventure pack/expansion
Designed and implemented scripts and animations for shark-attacks and sandworm-attacks

Character State Machine Design & Maintenance:

Designed and implemented updates, improvements and bugfixes for the character state machine in Age of Conan for 4 years
Wrote initial design for and implemented final design for players learning racial dance abilities

Animation Systems Design:

Designed and implemented updates, improvements and bugfixes for the character animation systems in Age of Conan for 4 years
Rebalanced PvE/PvP combat performance of male vs female characters by matching up their combat animations, impact animation keyframes and animation transition keyframes

Particle Effects:

Created particle effects for player spells, monster abilities, world effects, quest effects, character footstep effects, etc

Visual Effects Scripting:

Created scripts for advanced visual effects playing either through spells or based on animation keyframes (like footstep particles)

3D Models and Animation

Reviewed GFX assets (equipment, monster models) before implementation into the game
Fixed incorrect skinning and material/texture assignment for various assets
Updated virtually all shields and multiple combat animations in the game to reduce clipping with characters due to having incorrect sizes, rotations and attachment points
Created some basic character animations for quests
Created the animations for characters and sharks interacting in deep water…
Fixed minor issues with various character animations (jumping, some combo animations, all basic attack animations, stance animations, active block animations, etc)