Lead Level Designer
Twisted Pixel Games
- Conceptualized, mapped, and blocked out main campaign levels from start until completion: Yashida, Symkaria, and two secret levels resulting in exceptional first party content for the Meta Quest 3 (4.6 rating).
- Collaborated with performance teams and engineers to ensure level was designed for sublevel and streaming considerations, and to ensure the game remained performant
- Partnered with engineers, animators, encounters designers, systems designers, VFX, and project leads to identify needs, wants, resources, and bandwidth.
- Broke down level into segments and identified portions of the level into “moments,” set goals with production and delegated work between teams and met with them regularly to assess progress and provide feedback
- Designed one-off portions of campaign (Traps, Leadpool, ziplines, tank combat), and worked with team members to provide direction and specs for integration, feedback, and iterate level layouts based on progress
- Mentored Level Designers nearly every day to playtest their work, provide feedback, ideas, direction, and iterate based on notes generated.
- Regularly tested and implemented progression data and fixes relating to: in-game currency, XP, in-game viewer counts, set in-game shop item prices, unlock conditions, and ensured it was all functional. Wrote up bugs and tasks needed to make this work.
- Provided video captures and feedback for the content systems team, encounter designers, moments, and interactions as they were integrated.
- Wrote up bugs regularly and provided detailed feedback, screenshots, and video where needed to prevent extra time spent trying to reproduce for the relevant developer.
- Conceptualized, designed, and integrated 2 secret levels from start to finish (way less narrative driven, and more “designer playground” feel).
Notable Skills and Software Used:
Unreal 4, ClickUp, Outlook, Slack, Google Sheets, Zoom, OBS, Adobe Premiere, Photoshop
Levels
Yashida Campaign Level:
Yashida's intro sequence with Lady Deathstrike
Fork in the Caves leading to a dead-end-lookout point that foreshadows what's next in the level, and the other direction leads to the Waterfall Arena
The first encounter: Waterfall Arena in Yashida
Combat in the waterfall Arena in Yashida
Progress from the waterfall arena into the caves
A wall run is required to traverse this transition. I collaborated with environment artists to make this a recognizable landmark to have both form and function. If you fail, you can try again without dying, and it's angled so you can see it from the look-out spot earlier in the level
After the player leaves the last of the caves portion, they begin the rope bridge encounter where they can grapple enemies and throw them off for environmental kills, and also are introduced to archer enemy types that are placed on perches on the waterfall
Another look at the rope bridge portion leading to the entrance to the winding staircase
After the rope bridge, the player encounters archers perched up on cliffsides with arrows while explosive arrows shot from beyond the level boundaries explode the staircase in multiple sections forcing the player to dodge and shoot as they progress up stairs
After progressing through the caves, rope bridge, and winding staircase, the player approaches the entrance to the Yashida Compound
An area in the compound between encounters
The cliffside holdout is where the player gets served a series of quests after fighting many enemies through the Compound to slow pace down
Another angle of the cliffside holdout. The player must complete 4 quests to progress through the waterfall
The first read on the new section after the Cliffside Holdout: The Cliffside Dwellings
Cliffside dwellings requires a wallrun here to traverse the gap and progress
A look up to a few grapple points in the Cliffside Dwellings portion to require callbacks to the grapple mechanic taught earlier in the level (again)
Shortly after starting the zipline interaction in Yashida
A look at the periph on the north side from the zipline moment
The user is blindfolded from a cloth during the zipline, and once the cloth slips off, they are cut in half at the hip by this statue holding a sharp sword
The user gets blindfolded shortly before being sliced in half by a statue holding a sword, forcing the player to fight the following encounter with no legs
Zipline landing combat. The user lands in this courtyard without legs meaning they can't move and can only use swords. Enemies appear on the rooftops shooting projectiles, and enemies burst through paper walls which also demonstrate that these types of walls are destructible to the player.
After zipline combat, the player is funneled through a series of linear interior hallways for close-combat. This is the only "non-closet" room to add depth to the area.
Interior Hallways where members of the hand clan burst through doorways and paper walls to surprise the player for close melee combat.
Interior dojo-themed arena with paper walls that are destructible with swords/melee
Long staircase building up to the Final Compound building where a cinematic plays before the boss fight with Lady Deathstrike
The entrance to the Final Compound Building
The final hallway leading to the ritual interruption of Lady Deathstrike
The final room where you interrupt Lady Deathstrike and The Hand Clan's ritual before fighting Lady Deathstrike
Symkaria Campaign Level:
The starting area "Base Camp" for Symkaria
The player encounters a droid in a tank, defeats them, then hijacks the tank and must use its rockets to blow up barriers and progress through "tank commute" sections
The first "VR Interaction" section, where the player has to do a series of VR actions in a control tower to lower a bridge ahead to progress
An area framing an encounter for the user in the tank at the Small Plant section
The player is now on-foot in an arena called "Town Square" with a more traditional play space: crates, cars, street lights, trucks etc
The diner brought life and story through its visuals, showing that there was once prosperity and life, but has since been run-down and abandoned
After the diner, the user progresses through mainstreet for more visual story telling and empty play space in between encounters
The 2nd tank encounter play space built to be open and big enough for the tank enemy to navigate and use all of its abilities against the player. The user must defeat the tank enemy, hijack the tank, and use its rockets to blow up the barricade and progress on the "2nd tank commute"
The 2nd tank commute provides empty space between encounters, and a drop for a tank upgrade (not pictured) deploys at this abandoned gas station to use at the following tank encounters
This section has a very straightforward path, requiring the user to use rockets to blow up barriers, and enemies constantly framed in front of them
The user is blocked by the Big Bridge, and must choose which Tower to approach first: East or West. The user has to enter each radio tower interiors to encounter enemies and do 1 series of VR interactions in each in order to lower the bridge and progress.
Radio Tower West Big Bridge controls. The floor has water spilled and an electrical charge running through it, and the user has to do a series of VR interactions at the console while being electrocuted to lower the Big Bridge and disable the electrical current to exit the tower.
After the Big Bridge, the user enters a building with one exit, but will die if they go beyond the line where a series of enemy snipers will one-shot kill them.
Similar to the turret in the first level, and the tanks earlier in the level, the user has to jump kick to mount the sniper gun, but instead of having control over the gun, they are surprised with leadpool. A character the user has to load into the gun, then shoot them out into a hole in the building, then the user takes control of leadpool, avoiding obstacles for about 10-15 seconds until they reach the end and explode the entire building
The user navigates Leadpool through a series of obstacles until they hit a "reactor" at the end to signify success
Another look at the reactor
