From spring 2013 through spring 2015, I served as Lead Level Designer for Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade.

The Promethium Refinery, our first Early Access map.  Level design by me, many artists involved in beautification.

In this role, I was the owner of a number of levels and responsible for their creation end-to-end; from high concept, to flow diagramming, greyboxing, cover placement, and working with the art team to ensure the levels looked beautiful and played great.

The Promethium Refinery graybox.

Whiteboxing a first pass level flow for a Publisher Demo

Another Promethium Processing Facility, grayboxed by me

The Promethium Pump, our first Early Access map.  Level design by me, many artists involved in beautification.

In addition to the level design work of creating the maps that I owned, I was responsible for driving the overall vision of the level design, and solving the problems of how to create a massive amount of content in a short amount of time.

The initial vision of Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade was “Planetside 2 meets Warhammer 40,000”.

Our approach to solving the unique challenge of creating 75+ outposts over an open world continent was to create re-usable buildings, as can be found in Planetside 2.  We produced around 20 of these, iterating on scale, encounter distance, and layout.

When my creative director proposed that we move faster, the next solution I presented was to create modular clusters of buildings and cover, which could be arranged together like puzzle pieces in different configurations.  Using this process, myself and my fellow LD were able to greybox 30 outposts in a single 2 week sprint.

Quick tests of chunk-based building

Quick tests of chunk-based building

I also participated in the design and presentation of various game design features, under the guidance of our lead game designer.

Front lines and territory conquest

First pass of territories and proposed placements of outposts and strongholds.

Finally, as Team Lead, I was responsible for managing a team of level designers as few as one (myself) and as large as four, tracking velocity, managing jira tasks, and serving as the go-between contact for my team with Game Design, Art, Production, and Creative Direction.

I was also a regular participant in the weekly livestreams showing the state of the game, and served as a high profile team member interacting with our community and core fans.