I have joined the Fortnite Battle Royale team as a Senior Level Designer, from Chapter 5 Season 1 onward. I work on the map, collaborate with the team, and fix bugs 🔧

Excited to share updates once they become public in the future, so stay tuned.

I was one of two Game Designer II's behind Valorant's brand-new Team Deathmatch mode. I singlehandedly designed all five of the mode's initial maps while simultaneously taking part in constructing the mode itself. I also made contributions to other alternative modes and competitive maps with design insights, technical work, and bug fixing.

Tactical shooter map design is all about strategy, clarity, and restraint. Unlike in many other shooter games, flat, grid-based orthogonal spaces are usually superior.

Collision-wise, maps are clean and clear of decorative obstacles that you would expect in other games. This applies to visuals too- the closer the map is to a literal greybox the better because noise affects players' ability to make split-second decisions. Most competitive players play on low graphics and would absolutely play on textureless greybox if given the option. Tactical shooter maps have to walk a narrow line between gameplay and art.

Maps are compact and fast-paced to contrast against the often slow and methodical competitive maps.

TDM maps ended up having quite a unique set of design requirements. Custom maps, symmetrical layouts, respawns, spawn rooms surrounded by one-way barriers, abilities enabled, a large number of map pickups, and all that has to work in harmony with tactical shooter gameplay. No other game combines these elements in this way for a team deathmatch mode, so it's not like we could just look at another game as a template- instead, we created something trailblazing that others may follow. I had put it to myself to find the general direction for maps, putting extra weight on my shoulders as an individual contributor.

This map evolved significantly over time but I quickly settled for this rectangular radial symmetry format with an isolated space on each side. This creates 3 lanes which felt like the appropriate amount for this chaotic 5v5 mode.

Mid has a mixture of orthogonal and non-orthogonal angles to create frantic engagements and an organic battlefield feel. The back of mid has a power position (nest) which offers a lot of visibility over mid but can be temporarily shut down with a well-placed smoke. They used to have a wall and narrow window but testing revealed that it added too much geo complexity.

The side spaces are simpler but confined and create some tense close-quarter engagements. Passing through means safely bypassing mid and flanking the enemy side of the battlefield.

This layout evolved substantially over time but the core idea was always this T-shaped dynamic, where a power position off to the side rules over mid, plus an almost completely isolated, extremely long sightline across the map.

Mid was meant to be the most hectic and fast-paced of all TDM maps, with narrow spaces and tons of cover to create a rat's nest where players are encouraged to constantly reposition while carefully clearing corners. The power position in mid used to be two paths that connected to spawns, but I ended up fusing them into a single space, which we internally referred to as "donut" for its delicious roundness.

The map always had this side lane with a super long and narrow sightline across the map, where players can engage in long-range reflex battles almost right out of spawn. At one point it even had two floors stacked on top of one another but that added too much complexity and ended up getting canned. This sightline eventually became the canal area on the live map.

This map started as a flat symmetry map with a long open lane down the middle and two buildings on the sides that could interact with one another.

Due to the challenges with the flat symmetry on District as well as on this one, the map was reborn as a radial symmetry with a completely new premise- therefore this map technically had the lowest iteration time of all TDM maps since art production began shortly thereafter.

The map's core goal was to have this pit in mid with a bunker in the center, and a sense of circular flow around that pit. The layout used to have tunnels connecting spawns directly to mid, and a Breeze-A pyramid in the center. The tunnels quickly became ramps and the pyramid became a tube-shaped tower. It even had Bind teleporter rooms for a few weeks, but that ended up getting canned because it was way too chaotic, especially with the constant sound effect going off every time someone teleported.

This one came together pretty fast in December 2022, as I was starting to get very comfortable with map design for the mode by that point and got into a good flow right before the holidays.

The idea for the map came from drawing the cool S and jokingly saying it could be a TDM layout. I created an experimental layout, realized it might actually work, and brought it to playtest. The map was initially called Crossroads and featured the namesake under/over crossroads in the middle, in the form of a bridge crossing over mid.

I was initially hoping this could be our first two-lane map, but playtesting revealed this was too hectic and the map needed additional space to disperse players, so I added that isolated side corridor on both sides.

The bridge soon proved to be problematic since the bottom part of dome smokes placed on the bridge created one-ways on the lower floor, an issue that was unsolvable with geo adjustments since the smokes have a massive radius and the map needed to stay reasonably flat. After some deliberation, I decided to turn the bridge into a zipline to achieve the same navigation crossover while introducing a bit of irresistible stupidity to mid. Unlike ziplines on Icebox, I set this one to transport players slightly faster- though I'm not sure whether this tweak made it into the final product.

Riot does not credit their developers hence I am uncredited for my years of work (the games are magically created by Riot Games, the company itself).

I've had the great opportunity to design levels for Halo Infinite, in lush Redmond WA. I was responsible for constructing major sections of the Forerunner chapters including the entirety of Silent Auditorium, and had an involvement in about a dozen open-world POIs, many of which got canned as part of a major rescoping of the campaign in 2019.

The game's campaign is a freeform open-world with a few sequential steps for the main story, but otherwise, players are free to complete the campaign in any order they want, which lends a feeling of freedom never seen before in the franchise.

Level design fell under two different buckets assigned to separate teams- one type was the open-world POI cells built on terrain, and the other was the more traditional linear levels. I got to work on both of these teams at different stages of production.

The open world consists of POIs distributed across a vast terrain, that can all be discovered and engaged from any direction. Their gameplay tends to lean more into the freeform sandbox gameplay and less towards curated scripted events. Most of them had to revolve around an arrangement of metal structures built on organic terrain, and needed to have full vehicle support which meant plenty of space to maneuver. They can have greater emphasis on vertical gameplay thanks to the new grapple hook ability and the immunity to fall damage.

There are three difficulty regions on the map acting as soft gates, but the game never truly blocks players and POIs can be tackled in any order, meaning that they still have to play fairly well with any level of arsenal progress for weapons/vehicles/abilities, and had to support the entire sandbox (allied NPCs, most AI classes, etc.)

Creating an open world with our limited tools was an immense challenge in and of itself. Since it was not initially designed for open-world streaming, the engineering team had to adapt the engine and tools on the fly mid-production, which created countless technical difficulties as we were building the open world.

Forerunner levels, internally referred to as dungeons, feature a structure akin to classic on-foot Halo levels. They were built with a modular kit of entire room pieces stitched together, doorframe to doorframe. It was challenging to achieve variety with the modular kit's limited number of pieces, but on the flip side, this allowed us to focus on crafting a more fine-tuned experience and lean into precisely timed scripted events and narrative beats.

Silent Auditorium, called Cortana Palace at the time, was initially meant to be a vertically stacked shaft with multiple floors, but we decided to rebuild the layout from scratch in a few weeks using a forward and uphill flow instead to cut down on vertical travel. Since we only had elevators and gravity lifts at our disposal for vertical movement, using so many of them in a row felt repetitive. Building this mission was a collaborative effort between myself, narrative, animation, and environment artists John Wilson and Tim Diaz.

The mission regularly alternates between challenging combat, exploration, and narrative sequences. When carefully alternating between those modes, we can make each of those moments resonate more through juxtaposition, which is what I was shooting for with Forerunner missions like this one. Combat is meant to be ferocious because this is the final story mission of the campaign and by now we expect players to have mastered their entire arsenal. This is meant to be a challenging final test.

The architecture flows left and right, snaking back and forth around an important central space multiple times. The goal was to create a sense of setup and recall with that space, and a feeling of progress, since it's generally hard to sense progress when we're just walking through countless rooms with no greater spatial context. When we first enter the room, we can see an energy bridge far into the distance, and that's the energy bridge we're crossing the 2nd time around, and so on. All three times, we deliver a narrative event here without disabling controls.

The Harbinger boss fight was challenging to adapt to since the AI came in hot and kept changing from one week to the next, from too difficult to too easy, and the supporting waves of enemies had to constantly adjust accordingly. What we ended up with is something tough as nails and I believe this is an appropriate level of challenge for the final boss of the campaign. The level used to also have a sentinel boss fight before the Harbinger, but that got canned per narrative direction, and that massive room got turned into a simple story beat.

I think the team did a fantastic job on the Forerunner missions considering they had to be built using only pre-made rooms. I believe we played to the strengths of that constraint - this forced us to adapt and find ways to squeeze out as many variations as possible.

Working on this felt like coming full circle since the first Halo was one of the games that sparked my passion for making games in the first place, 20 years ago already.

I was a level designer on an early version of the project that got shelved back in 2019, at Defiant Studios in NYC. Together with another level designer, we were responsible for designing the moment-to-moment gameplay of the whole game from start to finish. I was working closely with art, narrative, and engineering to create key moments and locations for this mechanics-driven hack-n-slash game.

The plan was for the world to hold many secrets and stories to discover, thanks to a heavy focus on environmental storytelling and bespoke environment art, akin to a Souls-like or Metroidvania game.

The layout was an interconnected world connecting four distinct biomes seamlessly. We had three biomes in greybox and one "castle" biome fully constructed with modular kits. The whole team was hard at work creating a vertical slice sequence with that chapter of the game, with exploration, scripted events, hack-n-slash combat sequence, and one polished boss fight.

The studio had to shut down in May 2019 due to a dispute with the game's publisher, CI Games. Defiant was left out of the credits in the final product, let alone the individual contributors such as myself. Luckily most of the team quickly got back on their feet, formed the NYC branch of People Can Fly, and later went on to ship Outriders, a third-person shooter game.

Defiant was an incredibly talented and passionate team and I am grateful to have been part of it.

I've had the amazing opportunity to own and build various segments for this story-driven single-player campaign, shifting seamlessly between exploration, story, and superhero brawler sequences.

Making those elements work together correctly was a cooperative effort between myself, art, animation, and engineering. Level designers had complete ownership over their levels from start to finish, and were responsible for bringing them to their maximum potential.

I worked closely with developers from other teams, communicating my ideas, and assembling everybody's work into crazy gameplay sequences! I strongly improved my scripting skills and introduced my method for scripting levels to the team. It became the model for how other levels would be made.

One of my personal goals when working on this project was to make sure the gameplay is always as fun and as feature-complete as possible for the current stage of production, so everyone can see what we're shooting for. The level is fully playable early. It makes everyone's life easier and gives us time to make adjustments. The more ahead design is production-wise, the better everything flows afterward.

I introduced a new level-scripting method which later became the standard for the whole campaign. It can be best described as a nested linear timeline-like structure organized by progression. Each progression step has its ID and updates a global progression index variable accordingly as part of its execution. This index can then be used to make progression checks. This method was successful because it suits how chapters are designed, a linear story-driven structure. The level scripts were previously quite disorganized which caused a large number of bugs and technical difficulties, so this scripting overhaul was welcome and beneficial.

This project was an important step in my career and I am proud of what we managed to accomplish through obstacles and limited resources.

My role on the project was to create dozens of modular POIs to procedurally distribute around the world while following an authored set of rules. I tuned the distribution rules for many of these elements, like padding, and connections with other elements like roads, buildings, shore, terrain, foliage, etc. Not all POIs would spawn on a given session, so there's still new content to discover on the next playthrough.

Some of the POIs I built are designed to be simple with a bit of loot and a small encounter, while others are full-fledged dungeons or sets that are packed with story elements, quests, dialogue, and scripted events. They would often start from a simple sketch in my notebook of a layout, diagram, or sometimes just in text form.

I've had the joy of designing quests, locations, NPC encounters, and POI variants, with some amount of branching/randomness within them. It's not only the construction of the world that's procedural, it's also some microelements within a given POI. Some geo, NPCs, and items have interchangeable variants, so things play out slightly differently every time. I'm glad I got to help define that feature.

So here's a lesson for small indie teams with limited resources: Start your project by focusing on one good idea, and capitalize on that. Build around your strength. It may be possible to expand afterward, but make sure to keep the design coherent and synergistic with that strong core idea.

For this project I wanted to make a fun-oriented, quirky custom game type. Endless waves of demons are throwing themselves into the core at the center, dealing damage to it. If you die or the core's power reaches zero, it explodes and it's game over!

Your final score is based on how long it survived, so it's all about getting better at the mode's objective and achieving the highest possible score. You need to kill the enemies in their tracks and preserve the core's health for as long as you can. The waves become harder over time, while all you have is a powered-up pistol that can shoot as fast as you can press LMB!

One of my goals with this project was to see if it was possible to make a Doom level that has constant action, with zero downtime from start to finish. I managed to do this by using a smaller layout to increase the density of combat, by spawning enemies on a timed loop instead of all at once, and by capping the number of enemies to a lower amount than the game's limit. This way, there are a few enemies that are "in the bank", ready to spawn at any time in case a lot of them get wiped at once.

The core moves up and down between floors every 15-20 seconds, so you need to use stairs, jump-pads and portals to navigate vertically.

Every 60 seconds, a power station will activate somewhere in the arena - Interacting with it will fully restore the core's power, at the cost of spending time to get there, and turning your eyes off the objective for a few seconds. So it becomes an interesting gamble, especially when the core is at low health.

This project allowed me to practice certain aspects of design, for instance, tells and feedback: Every gameplay event has an appropriate amount of feedback linked to it - Like the color of the lights and the core itself are linked with stages of health, and there's a PA voice that plays when a new stage is reached. This is to make sure the player is aware of the remaining health since this is the utmost priority with this game type.

I also learned to work under limitations and create something fun under important technical constraints. Initially, I wanted the waves of enemies to be composed of only explosive zombies, but since they are very easy to kill I needed to spawn more of them to compensate. But Doom does not support that many enemies to be spawned at a time, so I had to change the design, and instead spawn tougher enemies that would add more "fighting time" for a lower enemy count.

Download the add-on directly in-game with the code ERW8FCU9

A brutal twist on the classic "survival mode" seen in other games, which raises the stakes the better and luckier you get!

You spawn in an empty room with a demonic nest at the center. Once you interact with it, the doors open and the game starts. When you enter a new room, a wave composed of 2 random types of enemies appears, and you are locked in until you defeat them all. Then the lockdown is lifted, and you are free to move to a new room. The goal is to get as many kills as possible before you die, and your score is saved on the map's leaderboard!

The geo is structured so players are never forced to go back into the last area they just cleared. They can just keep moving forward and will naturally visit a wide variety of areas:

Every 10 kills, enemies get a +25% damage bonus - That means the game gets very challenging over time, and past a certain point, any hit will one-shot you.

Your weapon is replaced by a new one chosen at random among a specific selection, also every 10 kills, the waves of enemies can be composed of anything, from the puny little Imps to the powerful Barons of hell.

The purpose of these features is to add an element of luck and increase replayability - Even if you're good at the game, you might find yourself in very tough situations, or you might suddenly the BFG 9000, which is so powerful it's a "free win" on the 10 next enemies, no matter their current power level!

There's also a shield item in each room, which respawns whenever you re-enter it. They can help you survive longer if picked up regularly.

Get the add-on in-game with the code TYTLYB2V

I had the pleasure of building a custom map for DOOM 2016, using their SnapMap editor. It's a real joy to mess around and build levels when the mechanics are already proven to be polished and fun.

In Frantic, players try to get the highest score by killing demons as fast as possible within a time limit.

The idea with the timer is to encourage players to be aggressive and fight fast, but they must be careful while doing so - if the game ends with them dying instead of the timer reaching zero, they get no score at all.

On top of that, the level features a combo system, which multiplies the score received for each kill, up to 10x - if no kill is registered for 10 seconds, the combo meter resets back to 1x.

These elements create a fun tension during gameplay. Encounters become a "gamble" between killing fast to get more points and taking time to be safer.

The waves of enemies become more and more difficult, up to a certain point where it peaks and stays hard until the game is over. This has the quality of giving players time to understand the concept, instead of immediately throwing difficult encounters at them while they're still learning, which would be frustrating.

Players must move to a new room every 10 kills, and fight a new wave of enemies there. All rooms are linked by portals, allowing players to move between them in any direction.

Each room also contains 2 bonus items that add an extra 30 seconds to the clock when collected. Picking them up will give players more time to get a higher score, but again, that's only if they survive the run.

Get the add-on in-game with the code HLHBULF3