Central Design Tools

Lead a team of Level Designers in a Lost Boys Interactive initiative to create a suite of level design tools for rapid prototyping for all new projects.
Research Unreal Engine 5’s out of the box level design tools and determine what shortfalls we will need help with from engineering.
Lead a team of Level Designers in a mock project to block out a multi-spoke level, documenting needs as they arise.
Coordinated Level Design needs with Technical Design Lead for tools, interactive objects, and character setups.
Look at what foundational mechanics are needed for the types of games the studio makes.
Create standardized and flexible block out tool kits for new projects to ramp up quickly.

With a team of level and technical designers, my job was to come up with a way to utilize all of their skills and maximize out of the box tools usage.
I brainstormed with the team to come up with a central story for these series of levels.
- What were the high level story notes and the subsequent story beats that would define each level.
- What skills/tools were available to the player from the start.
- What materials were needed to build/fix machines that could fabricate tools, weapons, and upgrades.
- Who were the enemies and why were they there?
My initiative was to create a hub and spoke mission to provide the backbone for tools exploration.
- This mission would give each level designer their own spoke to build, how they may “meet up” with another spoke, or visually see other spokes, and involve some gameplay advantage.
- For the technical designers, their job would be to come up with Blueprint tool kits we could duplicate and use to further the narrative and gameplay of the level.
  - I asked the tech designers for simple hooks for the level designers to use in order to trigger events like rock falls, multiple enemy spawners based on various inputs, enemy pathing, and other enemy behaviors.

Lead a team of Level Designers, Technical Designers, Engineers, and Artists to create a world that the player will transition to and from the first person shooter world into a 3rd person game.
Lead the Level Design team with weekly sprint tasks, working in close conjunction with producers on scheduling.
Develop Level Design best practices and documentation.
Documentation of the zone details, narrative beats, points of interests, and all zone dependencies.
Reviewed Level Design work on a weekly basis with playtests focusing on specific or recently worked on features.
Constant communication with other disciplines on intersecting areas of the narrative, levels, and progression.
Mentoring and reviewing not only the Level Designer’s work but with Technical Design, Art, and Engineering as they pertain to the 3rd person world.

Lead level design team in block out, landscape sculpting, gameplay scripting, & gameplay flow.
In charge of refining the level design pipeline and process.
Lead the Level Design team with weekly sprint tasks, working in close conjunction with producers on scheduling.
Developed level design best practices and documentation.
Worked closely with Art, Engineering, and Production to facilitate smooth transfer of content authorship between disciplines.
Mentoring and reviewing the level designers’ work and career progress.

Alien: Rogue Incursion