Shipped Games

I have shipped two of my games professionally and have released many more games for free over the past couple of years. Here's a short summary of my level design work on my shipped titles.

Surmount

Surmount is a playful rock-climbing game with a very unique control scheme! It's the result of a three year long collaboration between myself and the artist Indiana-Jonas. _[2021-2024]

• Over 30 hand-designed mountains to climb.
• Sophisticated level generation system that takes drawn outlines and turns them into fully-fledged levels.
• Over 1500 designed chunks to use with this level generation system to make an endless amount of climbing routes.
• 2D areas for challenging climbing and 3D areas for story moments/hanging out.

Berry People

Berry People is a short and cute game about photographing creatures in a big forest. It was a collab between me and the artist Kleingeld. _[2023]

• 100 unique berries to find in 18 different scenes.
• Metroidvania-style progression and guided exploration through a world without any text.
• Probuilder environments with custom shaders and large amount of unity editor tools to create charming areas to explore.

Education

I have studied Architecture at TU Delft _[2013-2017] and Game Design at the HKU. _[2017-2021]

Both focused heavily on running as many projects as possible with diverse teams and constraints. With one or two exceptions all the projects you see on this site were stuff I worked on outside of the curriculum.

Design Process

I have written an in-depth view into my blockout process and my considerations when designing levels. I have embedded the full pdf below:

Here's a quick summary for the people in a hurry:

1. Establish goals, place in larger whole, target audience.
2. Come up with core level concept (main mechanic, twist, narrative arch).
3. Sketch out blueprint for the level in engine. Walk around to iterate on of pacing & flow.
4. Fill out nodes in blueprint with rough blockout blocks. Decide on what locations actually represent, making a cohesive and diverse whole.
5. Playtesting sessions and iteration on rough blockout. Repeat in a loop and keep testing until the level is completely finished.
6. After the first (couple of) playtests: Level scripting and lighting.
7. When things are looking solid: First environment art pass (or full environment art pass for small-scale projects with time pressure)
8. When it's done: Document & Finalize

Style Matching

My full shipped games have all been made with Unity, but I have worked with various engines and game systems. Two good examples would be the maps I made for Quake and Counterstrike: Global Offensive where I tried to match the playstyle of the original games as closely as possible.

Flythroughs, greyboxes and documentation about their design process you can find on their respective pages:
Quake Counterstrike: Global Offensive

If you look through the level design tag on my portfolio you can find more examples of me style matching existing games in engines like Unity and Unreal Engine.

Programming

I'm also quite a strong programmer. It helps to be able to implement functionality myself and program tools to improve the process of designing levels.

• Wrote multiple level generation systems for different games that solve some sticky problems like the bowls of oatmeal problem, clean code architecture, feeling of progression etc.
• Singlehandedly ported and optimized Surmount to run on Nintendo Switch.
• Made multiple games completely solo and gained a good understanding of the challenges of every role in the game making process.

And that's it for the quick overview!

Thank you for taking a look! Feel free to reach out if you see anything that interests you or if you want to hear more about certain projects!