Jos Hendriks is probably one of the most respectable people on the Bioware team that’s currently working on Mass Effect 4. Not because his level designs are expected to be stellar, not because he seems like a generally amiable person but because there’s nothing but positivity outpouring from his personal Twitter feed, both personal and professional.
Teasing about the next Mass Effect in a series of Tweets, he says: “One of the joys of level design for me, personally, is working together with others to make something you share a vision of.” He goes on to talk about how building with simple blocks, coupled with “an idea of what it would look like when an artist makes it awesome.”
Showing constant gusto for his work, he further states that, “I just saw the first pass of one of the spaces in one of my levels that my artist built and it just makes me so excited to built it.”
He then talks about how an idea that started on a piece of document finally makes it way to player’s television sets. “When the cinematic designer and cinematic animator have their scenes built and working in the mission, and the conversations flow. And then audio comes in and does their final passes and it’ll sound and feel like a real space. And then time has passed and the game ships, and people get to see it on their TV at home, and hopefully enjoy the experience. And we get to think back of how this mission we built was once just a little outline in a word document.”
“Sometimes I need to remind myself of these things, because those tweets make it sound like that happens in the space of a couple weeks. When reality is, through scheduling, vacations, availability, pipeline improvements, priorities and all that, missions take months to build.”
When staff show enthusiasm, it makes the hype grow stronger. Mass Effect 4 is coming, roll on E3.