Lead Level Designer | 3D Multiplayer FPS | Unreal Engine 4 | Team: 50 | 4 Months
About The Game
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4 vs 4, Multiplayer, Capture The Flag Shooter
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Class based with 4 unique characters to choose from
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Use magic in a futuristic world to defeat your opponents in arena style combat
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Dash between rushing trains, climb inside a magic tree and activate jet engines to incinerate foes
My Role
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Manage 17 level designers spread over four teams
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Plan and prioritize Epics across sprints using Agile Development
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Maintain consistency across levels
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Facilitate cross-discipline communication
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Compile and maintain bug log using Jira
Design Goals
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Include Dynamic Level events in every level
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Make the flag a contextual piece that affected gameplay
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Create pathways in each level that catered to each of the 4 classes
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Use a small number of assets to build visually distinctive levels
Game Trailer
My Role
As the Lead Level Designer, I oversaw 17 level designers in the creation of 4 different levels. Managing that many people as well as coordinating with the art teams and programming teams took up the majority of my time.
Leading Level Designers
As a leader, I focus on guiding those I work with and helping them accomplish goals they want to accomplish. The levels all started with a theme that was decided on by designers working on it, while I gave feedback and helped them all stay consistent to the world and game. As it continued, I gave feedback and advice to all of them, but I also made decisions to make major and minor changes when I saw them going in the wrong direction.
Managing Multiple Disciplines
The level designers that I worked with were often called to work as specialists. This meant I had to adapt and learn quickly to also give feedback on other fields such as lighting, audio, scripting and particles. I not only needed to have a basic understanding to assist them in their work but also to communicate problems and concerns with the other leads for art, programming and our game designer.
What I Learned
Cutting Early
Cutting is never something that's easy to do. We initially planned out two game modes, traditional capture-the-flag and a deliver the bomb mode. We struggled for a long time to get in conveyances for deliver the bomb and it wasn't working well with playtesters. We attempted to make it work for much longer than we should have as it started taking time and resources away from other areas that could've used them. It took until after the project hit Vertical Slice that we decided to cut it.
Unfortunately, that decision came later than it should have, but I was able to learn from that and be prepared for my next project: Re:bound. When we struggled with getting enough resources to finish all four of our planned levels, I was ready to make the call then and there to cut down two of the levels and combine them. This way I could maintain the best parts of both levels while also reducing scope, focusing on quality over quantity.
Communicating With a Large Team
Going from a 5 person team to being a leader on a 50 person team was a big change. Early on, communication was a challenge with that many people all coming together for the first time. Design changes weren't getting spread out efficiently and progress within the different levels weren't seen by those not working on them.
I needed to create daily and weekly meetings and activities that everyone on the team could rely on happening. These included:
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Daily scrum: Blockers were shared and solved. I was also able to quickly learn what all 17 level designers were doing as well as what the artists and programmers were doing.
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Daily QA: Since we had no QA department, I had one person on each level team run through a different level and mark down bugs and problems.
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Bi-Weekly Quality Check: To maintain quality and consistency across all 4 levels I needed a formal time to sit down with the leads of each level and give feedback. This ensured that all of the levels received constant feedback as they rapidly changed.
