Technical World Designer
• Created and sketched the final map layout. (with co-level designer/Jacopo Voce)
• Designing, developing and maintaining 1/6 of the world.
• Creating playable locations with modular assets.
• Using World Machine to create the base terrain + Creating and maintaining landscape material
• Bringing new knowledge and innovative, faster work-flow methods to the level design team.
‍
‍

▶️ The Survivors is a student project, created by 50+ developers. Released on Steam and had an average player count of 1000+ players.

▶️ While we were working on the project, other battle royale type games started to appear. Like Fortnite and Apex Legends. It was great as it allowed us to do thorough research on what makes this genre interesting and compare the differences between each game.

Being able to understand different players playstyles, allows us to make hypothesis and predict scenarios that could happen in games. As level designers we can influence these aspects to create a clear and more engaging gameplay for players to enjoy.
‍

Read my recent research on battle royale games, what makes them unique and the differences between each games
Click here to read the article
‍

▶️ We used modular building blocks to create our levels, allowing us to re-use assets across the map. The modular building blocks got converted to a static mesh. They were divided into interior and exterior to help performance.

The methodology for creating the buildings was that we keep things stupid and simple. Options to run to cover, go upstairs, entrances and exits. They all should be clear to avoid confusion. Players should be easily able to make a mental map of the building from the get go.

▶️ 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, we used this method to save time on sculpting everything by hand. The idea was that everyone could use it to create interesting and good looking terrain in the editor.

We had the possibility to create our own heightmaps in WorldMachine through perlin noise, shapes and masks but also use inspiration from satellite data. The heightmaps used to create stamps are masked out with a cylinder mask with the edges blurred to improve blending when stacking stamps. Any small imperfections could be fixed afterwards by using the UE4 terrain tools to manually sculpt back important details and or mask them out inside of WorldMachine.

This allowed us to quickly iterate and create believable high quality landscapes without hand sculpting everything with UE4 basic terrain tools.

‍