THIRD person shooter || unreal 4 || october 11, 2016

level designer || DECEMBER 2014 – OCTOBER 2017

I joined The Coalition as a level designer in December 2014, working on the single-player campaign. I had primary responsibility for three levels from early development through to ship, as well as assisting in the finaling of several others. In addition I prototyped and refined various blueprints for use by other level designers in concert with the animation and technical design teams, including spawners, doors, and other interactables.

Responsibilities

• Designed and built two missions from greyblock to shipping.
• Took over responsibility for the Prologue missions from early functional to shipping
• Built prefabs and blueprint scripts for use by larger design team
• Worked closely with the technical design team on the implementation of action station scripting, spawner blueprints, dynamic cover, and destructible props.

The Farm

The Farm was my initial responsibility on joining the team, and I worked on it until ship. I took over the level at early greyblock, finishing the layout of the house interior and building out the grounds as well as the encounters and narrative experiences along the level. In addition to the standard gameplay elements, I built a functional prototype of the helicopter boss fight, destructible props, and multi-stage cover objects.

The latter half of the level, featuring the co-op split through a windstorm, I took over at a later stage of greyblock and was responsible for finishing the greyblock and functional passes, refining the gameplay, combat, and blueprint work and taking it to shippable.

The Tunnels

The catacombs and tunnels beneath was my second primary responsibility. Like the Farm, I took over the level at an early greyblock state and built it up and took it to ship. The level was heavily focused on creating a claustrophobic, horror-movie atmosphere and creating combat encounters and narrative moments that supported this was a very satisfying effort. The natural caverns beneath the catacombs expanded a great deal as the level was iterated upon, in particular adding the co-op split section later in development – which required close work with the technical design team to build the functionality for a three-character split rather than the standard two or four.

A personal highlight from the work on this level was prototyping and pitching the “mucus wall” interactable that was later given art support and added to the game as a globally usable blueprint, and working with the writer and narrative team to get it narrative support.

The Prologue

I took over the three Prologue levels midway through development after they had received art treatments and were gameplay functional. My first effort was optimization and cleanup, updating and streamlining the level scripting and encounter design to project standards and shippable quality. Then building upon the existing design to add interactiveness to the levels themselves through dynamic encounter scripting, destructible cover, and additional narrative elements. A major effort on these levels was the horde assault in the final of the three levels. I worked closely with gameplay design and animation to design and build low-cost enemies that could create the swarm effect while remaining performant.