The Survivors is without doubt the biggest project that I have ever worked on with a Steam release. With 5 other level designers, we were in charge of creating and populating the 3km by 3km level.

Pre-production, Level Design Research & UE4 Technical Support
‍I did research into flow, landmark placement, spatial composition / focal points. Next to being a level designer, my role in the survivors was a supportive role. As one of the developers with good insight knowledge on Unreal Engine 4. I was tasked with researching how we could optimize performance. I received support from the lead artist and lead programmer, who gave me more insight on what could potentially be bottlenecking our performance. I would be the person to talk to regarding optimization in the level.

High Level Design / Layout Creation (ft. Jacopo Voce)
Co-level designer Jacopo and I created the layout of the level together. We created a rough layout to decide a few key factors. How many Point of Interests did we want to have? The approximate walking distance between the POIs, possible division between areas (theme-based) etc. It served as a guide to keep the team coherent about the high level plan for the level.

Whiteboxing & Terrain Sculpting
‍For the project I developed a method of creating terrain with use of heightmaps. Using the heightmaps as an "alpha stamp" to add/subtract terrain geometry. This method was shown to the other level designers, majority of the level designers would end up use this method. With pre-made alpha maps, this method proved to be faster and more rewarding than hand-sculpting the terrain. We had the possibility to create our own heightmaps in WorldMachine or from Satellite data. Any small imperfections could be fixed afterwards by using UE4 terrain tools to hand paint important part back.

Next to terrain sculpting I also bashed some houses together. Jacopo and I had a shared Point of Interest, he made the initial design of the train-station, made a rough whitebox and I would improve it by replacing the whitebox with the modular kits from the artists and made some additional flow improvements before giving it back to Jacopo.

Procedural Foliage System
‍I worked on a feature, that in the end didn't got implemented due to time constrains. The feature I created is basically a copy of the procedural foliage system based on masks. I got inspired how we could optimize our own workflow by using this method to create specific biomes. It would allow us to import a mask and instantly see the updated result.
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‍Technical Artist (Shaders)
‍As the artists were busy, I also filled in the role as the landscape shader artist and terrain artist. I made terrain shaders before so the task was pushed onto me.
I created a 6 layer landscape material that would automatically apply the textures corresponding to the set parameters (for example: at 55 degree angles, the material would display a rock/cliff texture)‍
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