Level and Mechanics Design
Below are some of the projects I've been working on, from the more recent to earlier works, chronologically. Click the titles of projects below to go to their websites!
Cantata
2022-Ongoing
Cantata is a highly modular Bronzepunk dark fantasy TTRPG (Tabletop Role Playing Game), built to work and play like an immersive sim the likes of Deus Ex, Fallout New Vegas, Thief, etc and running on a framework of 2d10 rolls and skill proficiencies. It is still in development.
Structured to play with the world outlined in the Astareum, what mechanically separates this from many others that also play around themes of fantasy like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder is its modularity in gameplay and character building both: The system makes use of "Edges" and "Hindrances" to bypass the need for "Classes", enrich and ease narrative structuring and "Session Points" to make "Levelling" work on a finer and more custom grain. The way the systems weave together allow for a practically infinite range of mechanically and narratively different characters, and helps make every step of progression the player takes feel like it's truly theirs.
Fhaesir's Pride
2021 - Ongoing
Marmortal is a First Person Shooter and Platformer game made in Unity that focuses on a plethora of platforming puzzles and high-speed combat with tight and satisfying controls. The game won 2nd place award in the nationwide game-development competition Bit1 in 2021. The Unity demo is complete, and an expansion of the concept in Unreal 5 is in development right now.
The linked itch.io page might be restricted due to publicity reasons, but you can ask me for a link to the latest build!
I work on multiple aspects of Marmortal; one of my two major roles in it being level design. In level design, We take the story beats we arranged in the narrative department, and the learning curve of the different abilities we designed in the game design department, and weave them into levels with arenas and platforming puzzles using the metrics we tested and from the user feedback gathered by the UX department.
Over half of the levels in the Unity version of the game are by my design, and I have gone over the entire game multiple times with the VFX person of the group to give each and every level a unique silhouette alongside their puzzles and challenges. My role as level designer continues as the Unreal version of the game is developed.
Words Left Unsaid
2020 - 2021
Words Left Unsaid is a noir mystery game made in Unity about a detective, an author, and a haunted hotel based around gathering clues of events that have happened in before and putting together the correct order in which they have happened.
Contains Flashing lights.
Like in Marmortal, I have had two major roles in the preparation of WLU, and one of them was level design. Together with one other person I've designed how the rooms in the motel fit into each other, as well as how the puzzles in each room are built, using the storyline we created over while writing the script for the game.
CRSG is a serious game about learning code review with science-fiction / exploration themes in it. It aims to teach its players the fundamentals of code review with multiple gamified examples. The current version of the app requires basic working knowledge of coding in Java. The project was written with Javascript and dressed with HTML and CSS.
This game was released as a tool paper on FSE 2020.
I have had multiple roles in this project, in its gamified parts and otherwise. For level design, I didn't design the content in the levels as much as I designed the readability and accessibility of said levels, with quick, readable and easy to navigate access to menus, charts, graphs and references, as well as how the hint system would work in them.
Major Game Jam Games
2019-2020
Rebuild Echo was made in GGJ 2020 under the theme of "repair", a 2D platformer about a mechanic in a post-apocalyptic world who finds a barely working robotic head in a junkyard. The robotic head, called Echo, talks to the mechanic in broken whispers and a poem, urging the mechanic to go to the 4 towers of old that hold the rest of its body. It is built in Godot 2.
Homeward was made in GGJ 2019 under the theme of "home", a light-hearted, top down 2.5D bullet hell shooter about a grumpy old man who just wants to rest, when his entire house is stolen from under him by aliens! The man has no chance but to find aliens, invade their ship, and get his house back! It is built in Unity.
In both Rebuild Echo and Homeward, the entire team was almost fully made of programmers, so in the spirit of Jamming, I partially handled multiple roles, as had the rest of the team. In Rebuild Echo I designed how the short 1 level we had the time to implement would introduce the player to the controls, the dangers of the environment, and the gadgets they could activate to move forward in the level. In Homeward, the levels were procedural in nature, so I designed what kind of structures, bonuses or dangers and how often they would spawn in the different levels of the game, as well as designed how the boss level would deliver the ending of the game with its construction.