KYLE HANSELMAN

gameplay trailer

In March of 2022, Puny Human contracted with KRAFTON's Striking Distance Studios to work on their upcoming title The Callisto Protocol. I was embedded into the SDS team as a Level Designer on the scripted event team.

scripted events

As part of the scripted event team, I worked closely with numerous disciplines to ensure the highest possible quality in our real-time cinematics. My role was to implement cinematics into the game world via visual scripting and custom level sequence tools then polish those cinematics through bug fixes, optimizations, and adjustments according to feedback from directors.

While I worked across nearly every sequence in the game, I spent a particularly long amount of time working on the cinematics below.

levels

In my year and a half working with SDS, I worked across the project on almost every cinematic in the game. That said, I spent most of my time working on the cinematics in the levels: Colony, Lost, Tower, and DLC.

common issues

Common fixes included smoothing out camera/animation pops, adjusting character positions, ensuring actors are in the correct world/local space, adjusting level logic to more seamlessly transition to/from cinematics and gameplay, and adjusting environments to suit cinematics.

To do this, I got to stretch my QA legs and gained a discerning eye for minor glitches and pops and provided feedback on weak points of the cinematics.

the team

I worked closely with animators to ensure their vision is represented, level designers so level logic plays the cinematics in a way that doesn't interfere with gameplay, lighting artists so the characters and other important narrative pieces are well-lit and read well, VFX artists so their work helps add visual drama, engineers to ensure a bug-free experience, and environment artists to ensure the environments look beuatiful and well framed during cinematics.

what i learned

To do this work, I had to familiarize myself with several custom tools developed by SDS engineers and learn Unreal Engine's Level Sequence and animation system. I also had to learn the many different possible issues and how to fix them.

Since the issues were so varied and touched many systems, I learned about animation pipelines, rigging, socketing, using animation graphs, blueprints and components, save and loading systems, and much more! By the end of the project, I became a source of knowledge about these systems, custom and packaged, the levels, and the story of The Callisto Protocol.