About Me
My name is Paul Hilton and i have been working as a games designer/producer/business development in the Digital Interactive Entertainment (D.I.E.) industry since the late 90′s. I have over sixteen years games industry experience in Quality Assurance, Lead Games Designer, Producer, Senior Producer, Studio Manager, Acquisitions and Licensing. I am a published author in game design strategies and an award winning designer of mobile and console digital interactive entertainment products, Lemmings Revolution and Stuntman mobile.
Content Design for Online MMO
Producing content for one of the largest free to play MMO games.
World design, character profiles and game mechanic interactions for mass multiplayer online games.
Nintendo DS
I have produced a number of treatments for DS games for a variety of developers in the North of England.
Flatout : Ultimate Carnage (WII)
Created the design treatment for converting Ultimate Carnage to the WII. This involved redesigning the menus, interfaces, game structure and additional controls for motion sensing and wiimote.
Emote Games Ltd
Emote Games is a publisher/developer which creates high end multi platform, connected, PC/PS3/mobile games which integrate with their in house character creation and social networking technology to create unique social gaming experiences.
Emote was the fourth start-up company that I had joined and after securing a deal with Sony, emote opened three offices and I ran the Liverpool Studio which evaluated external projects/companies and generated all creative material including multiple design treatments.
In Dec 2008, after funding difficulties, emote closed the Liverpool Office and concentrated its development resources in the production studio in Derby.
TheHunter.com
TheHunter.com was the first product produced by emote using their in house tools and the Just Cause 2 engine from Avalanche Studios. The Hunter is a unique production that uses the conventions of MMORPG’s combined with social networking elements.
TheHunter was an interesting project to design as it required a multitude of skills to integrate the Participate technology, Just Cause Engine and the business needs associated with a free to play/subscription model. The design delivered all the required components for a multi platform (PC/Web/Mobile) product with RPG character progression and structure, design features released through iteration, virtual items and a subscription model. TheHunter.com continues to grow but suffers from not being browser based (Unity Engine) and the overheads of this decision. I learned a great deal about animal AI, ballistics, North American flora, virtual characters , push/pull narrative techniques and MMO design and production issues.
Partcipate
The Participate design consisted of three technologies which allowed for character creation, social networking functionality and offline image rendering (to be distributed to any connected digital device).
In addition to the standard design features of general look, bone structure, hair colour and clothing Participate also utilised a specific RPG system which allowed your character to “earn XP” by playing in any genre or type of game connected to the Participate engine.
The social network design was web 2.0 with movable, scalable, customisable widgets and customisable pages, alongside the more generic friends list and banking functions.
The goal of Participate was to allow developers to concentrate on content and gameplay while utilising robust character creation tools, socially enabled web content, tournaments, gifts and either precanned or dynamic video footage with character composition to enhance their products.
