LEVEL DESIGN AND BUILDING WORLDS
STATION 78 represents the state of the art for my skillset, showcasing the procedural generation capabilities of Unreal 5.6, massive landscape, dense foliage, and environmental effects. My goal was to push the limits of my landscape authoring skills and see what Unreal 5 is capable of, and I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface!
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Emphasizing great scale most of all, I opted to create a huge open world map to explore the tools. I wanted the landscape to feel like the mountains I grew up around during my schooldays in Switzerland, where the landscape fully wraps around you and makes you feel comparatively small. I generated the terrain with a tool called Calysto (formerely called “Massive”) with some manual landscape blending to touch up rougher spots, and applied a self made landscape material (which I intend to use for physical material-based spawning as my next PCG iteration!) For foliage placement, I opted to use a very large Procedural Foliage Spawner volume with a couple dozen Static Mesh Foliage actors set up to spawn under various conditions, though I’m still debating whether PCG graphs or foliage spawners are the best method – I think maybe using PCG for a general foliage generation pass on a large scale, with some smaller, more granular foliage spawners at key spots, will be my ultimate combined method.I also wanted to stretch the capabilities of a few new tools I’d acquired, such as a diverse set of fog cards (used here as background fog visible across vast distances) and some advanced volumetric fog assets. Finally, I used this side project to advance my knowledge of Unreal’s updated movie render queue capabilities, and implemented color correction and lossless 4K resolution output so that I could put together the footage seen above. As a cinematic designer as well as a level designer, I enjoy the chance to wrap a story around every creation, which is why I turned the final footage into a concept trailer with some additional sound passes added in Vegas, just for the fun of it.
I first started working on Thunder Highway ten years ago, but left the project on the backburner over the past 8 years to focus on growing my skills at AAA studios. Now I’m back with new focus and greater capabilities, that I intend to use to the fullest to create a resounding action-strategy hybrid game. The original design was prototyped in Unity 4, and is currently being rebuilt from the ground up in Unreal 5, leveraging the massive landscape authoring capabilities and performance optimisations in the latest versions!
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There’s a ton of work ahead, but after six weeks of development it’s shaping up pretty well! Each week I’ve been tackling something new, running the gamut from perception-based behavior trees to physics-based flight controls, and most recently generating a very optimized jungle canopy using a spline-based procedural generation graph that I threw together. It’s currently leveraging Instanced Static Meshes to increase performance after being generated by the PCG graph, and I think I can optimize some further performance later. I included a big FPS counter onto my placeholder UI to make sure that I’d have one eye on performance at all times. I’m also excited to get back to implementing my newfound knowledge gained from making the STATION 78 cinematic side-project.Returnal was a project I joined midway through production, jumping in to champion the narrative level development and the implementation of its numerous cinematics. There’s a lot of overlap between the two disciplines in a narrative heavy game, and it was quite a feat to get it all shipped on time!
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I’m really grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such excellent designers, with the lighting and environment designers especially elevating every corner of the creepy world of Atropos. My aim was to focus on letting the player experience that world in a visceral, sometimes brutal way, leveraging both the extrasensory tech of Sony’s haptic DualSense controllers, as well as the traditional atmospherics of music and audio cues, mind-bending VFX, and timing everything just right.Returnal: Ascension was a rare opportunity to have another attempt at the source material, quickly spun up after the successful launch of the base game. It was exhilarating to be part of the creative process from the start, and the narrative we pulled together in less than a year feels like a well-earned encore!
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This time I had a much greater hand at developing the early design of our narrative levels, iterating deeply on the Hospital liminal space we designed to complement the House sequences from the base game. The great challenge was to allow for the player to visit both narrative locations in any order, as the player is free to approach the game’s narrative at their own pace. This was a core focus in Returnal and what we wanted to do with narrative gameplay next, and finding ways to augment the core gameplay loop with narrative beats was something we expended a lot of effort to achieve.Control was a project I jumped into feet-first with minimal prior experience, and found myself swimming with some of the best level designers in the business. It was a mind-blowing inauguration into the level design craft, and I’ve aimed to surpass those standards ever since!
Jesterbox Creations 