Juan Pablo Benitez
Level Designer
Our team lead gave me a week to make the office. I decided that the best way to approach this was to read the documentation we had on the character and role play as him while making the room.
I made up a few cases Fletcher had solved and used that as anchor points to begin. One of my favorite ones was Jimmy’s case. He had disappeared and a few days later his mother hired Fletcher to find him. Fletcher eventually found his body in the nearby woods. He was beaten up pretty bad and his shoes were missing. Fletcher spent years trying to find the culprit but was never able to. He even dedicated a whole table in his office to his case.
I made up small events like this that helped me design the office. Doing so made things easier for me because I only needed to ask myself “would Fletcher put this here?” If the answer was no I would move on to something else.
team photo
Because I only had a week to do all this I spent quite a few all nighters at the school with the other members of the team. The school had a room dedicated to VR development and that room became our headquarters.
We would spend several nights in a row in that room. Sometimes even without going home. After the second day without sleep, we would start to slowly lose our minds. In order to keep our sanity some of us would play VR games while the rest was working.
When people seemed to get frustrated I would suggest watching some objectively hilarious videos, ranging from seagull videos to food reviews. But the most of the time we would go to the McDonald’s near the school for some coffee and 3 am burgers.
You get to know a person pretty well when you spend some much time with them like this. It was during this time that I made some of my fondest memories of school. I really enjoyed working in a team like that, it made me feel part of something bigger than myself.