Boom Blox: Bash Party
Boom Blox: Bash Party is a physics puzzle game developed by Electronic Arts and published for the Nintendo Wii in 2009. The game has a Metacritic aggregate score of 86%.
Team size: ~40
Development time: ~12 months
Contributions
Managed Design team of eight, four of whom worked remotely
Championed the game vision, introduced new modes, levels, and characters
Built, polished, and critiqued thousands of levels across 30 different game types
LinkedIn Recommendations
"Steve is always a pleasure to work with. There is typically some push and pull between what we want (designer) and what we can do (engineer); this never happens with Steve. He anticipates this and never asks for more than he is certain that he needs. As a direct result, his ideas for BOOM BLOX were fun at the purest level -- no bells and whistles needed. I thoroughly recommend Steve, and hope I get more time to work with and learn from him." - Ben Smith
"Stephen brought a refeshing blend of creativity and attention to detail to the Boom Blox team. He invented new level ideas at break neck speed while keeping a keen eye on timeline and demographic. But my favorite Steve skill is his interest in sound and music. As a sound guy, I always enjoyed hearing his informed sonic ideas...which I find to be pretty rare among game developers." - Brad Fotsch
"Stephen is one of the big reasons I fell in love with game making. I was so lucky to soak up so much knowledge from Stephen so early in my career. Extraordinarily fun to work with and a major mentor for everything related to game design. He never let anything fall through the cracks and has inspired me to look at design a bit closer throughout my career. I can only hope to work for this guy again. Making games with him was a highlight of my career. Thanks stv" - James Probst
BB2_Online_levels.xlsLiterally Thousands Of Levels Were Designed
In order to ship 400 levels (and almost 300 downloadable online) , my team created far more than that.
Here's a link to a working copy of the online level list:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mtXOvd157Sx24nYtoHC-b_LYroQaRylb
Snapshots
I'm pretty sure I created most of these levels.
Any that I didn't create myself, I certainly reviewed and signed off on.
Boom Bux
We introduced an economy and currency called Boom Bux into the game.
Boom Bux could be used to purchase Editor functionality and objects, as well as to unlock or SKIP levels (that the Player had difficulty with)
At first, the idea was that they were coins that would fall to the ground for the players to collect, but changed to fluttering multicolored pieces of paper money.
Character Papercraft
If you've read this far, you're obviously a super-fan and deserve this hidden treasure.
There used to be a page on the Electronic Arts site with this awesome collection of printouts but it's long gone.
Here you can download and fold Boom Blox and Bash Party characters to your heart's content, and please let me know you've done so with snaps of your characters!