For over ten years I designed more than 100 videogame levels for PC, Xbox,  GBA, Xbox 360, iOS and PS3 platforms.  I worked on multi-year, AAA productions with over 150 team members and with 3 member mobile productions lasting just a few months. I’ve scripted AI in Lua, built levels in Maya and 3DS Max, set up nav meshes in Unreal, optimized in Hammer, prototyped in Unity, and helped design custom tools and editors for many proprietary pipelines. You can find a more detailed account of my game work below….

2009 – Present

Co-Founder/Creative Director:

Started Hololabs Studio, an R&D company developing innovative mobile AR projects

Level & Game Design Instructor:

Teaching Level Design at Ubisoft Campus for Dawson college and Champlain University, including the creation of class outlines and curriculum for courses such as “Design and Communication Tools for Level Production”, “Intro to VideoGame Design”, “Level Design Production” , “Architecture and Space for Level Design” and “Advanced Seminar in Game Design”.

2007

Assassin’s Creed

As a Senior Level Designer I worked briefly with the Art Directors and Behavioral programmers to help build a new production paradigm for creating level assets that would support the game’s unique character mechanics (i.e. being able to climb over almost the entire environment in an open world) LINK

TMNT: GBA

Working again with the Ubisoft Montreal GBA team, I designed all the levels as well as a few of the Bosses for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. LINK

2006

Peter Jackson’s King Kong

Working in a proprietary engine and editor, I worked as a Senior Level Designer during early production on the King Kong levels for this Xbox game (before the production moved entirely to the Montpelier Studio) LINK

Splinter Cell: Double Agent

Having experience on “Chaos Theory”, I was brought onto this project as a Senior LD after Alpha to help complete the New York level and final boss of this Xbox game. LINK

Open Season: GBA

After years of working on next-generation, 3D levels, I had the great opportunity to work with the talented Game Boy team at Ubisoft Montreal on “Les Rebelles De La Forêt”, where I created about half of the levels in the game.

2005

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Using a heavily modified Unreal Editor, I was hired by Ubisoft Montreal to design and script the Seoul level for the Xbox version of this award-winning game. LINK VIDEO PART 1 VIDEO PART 2

Publication – I wrote a blurb on the level design process for Xplay’s Insider’s Guide to Gaming 2006

2003

Psychonauts

During the first half of this production I worked as a Level Designer using Maya inside a proprietary engine for this Xbox game. The LD team helped flush out the Lead Designer’s narrative, and I worked primarily on Raz’s mind and the Asylum exterior. I also performed extensive scripting tasks such as enemy & Boss AI using the LUA language. LINK

2002

Using 3D Studio Max and a Proprietary game-engine (on top of Renderware), I designed and constructed 5 levels for this Lucas Learning Playstation 2 title.

Publication –

“Three Inspirations for Creative Level Design” Gamasutra July 16 , 2001

I wrote a piece exploring “Pamphlet Architecture”, Lebbeus Woods, Italo Calvino and their relevance to designing interactive, narrative environments

1998

Werewolf: The Apocalypse- Heart of Gia

My first job was working as a Level Designer  in the original Unreal Engine (back when we modeled the entire environment and even created most of our own textures). I was one of the first to have that position at this company. The publisher and developer closed and the game was never released.

I co-founded Hololabs Studio, a Montreal research & development company specializing in interactive new-media solutions featuring mixed-reality technologies.  Farrago was our first indie production. It is a prototype for an easy-to-use App for creating your own augmented reality experiences on your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad 2.  Thanks to a successful kickstarter project, we released the app last fall, which you can download for free from the App store.

Breaking the Ice: Puzzle Mode

Breaking the Ice

Breaking the Ice

Breaking the Ice

Breaking the Ice

Breaking the Ice

Breaking the Ice

photos by John Desjarlais

I was commissioned by La Societe des Arts Technologiques [SAT] in Montreal to be the creative art director and interaction designer for the Telepresence project “Breaking the Ice”.  The Octas-award-winning piece was featured at the CODE art festival in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics and at the Quebec National Library in Montreal.

“From 4 to 21 February 2010, BREAKING THE ICE enables Montrealers to teleport from the lobby of the National Library to the Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver to meet their compatriots located more than 4,800 km away. Montrealers and Vancouverites will be able to converse and play through the touch screens installed telepresence stations in both cities.”

More Info Here (including an interview about the design development of the project)

Kaberet of Kinomorphosis

Kaberet of Kinomorphosis

Kaberet of Kinomorphosis

Kaberet of Kinomorphosis

Featured at the 2009 Art Pop festival and 2010 Nuit Blanche festival in Montreal, The Kaberet of Kinomorphosis is single-channel video installation that updates the old carnival headboard experience by adding the projection of moving bodies onto the user.  Below is a user-created video of the Kaberet’s youngest visitor, Scarlett, who was a Kinomorphosis sensation:

I was commissioned by by La Societe des Arts Technologiques [SAT] in Montreal to work as artist and interactive designer with the TOT immersive group on the isntallation 4Dmix3. The piece uses a ceiling-mounted camera to track multiple participants, using their movements to control mirrored avatars in a virtual world. The avatars can be led through a collection of phase-locked sound sources, allowing the users to discover hidden sonic material in the scene. A looping audio spooler records all of the sounds encountered, allowing users to create personal remixes of the sonic material. When a user comes to the front of the space (face-to-face with his or her avatar), they hear the result of their mix.

some photos from the 4Dmix cubed vernissage here

Inside the lumenarium

Inside the lumenarium

Inside the lumenarium

Inside the lumenarium

Depth of Perceptopn

Inside the Chamber of Hollowfields

Inside the Chamber of Hollowfields

change your point of view

The Illusionist

The Illusionist

Kaberet of Kinomorhposis

Inside the Lumenarium

Inside the Lumenarium

Dr. Optimystical\'s Vision Test

Built on the border between real and imaginary space, and Featured in Pop Montreal’s 2008 Art Festival, The Lumenarium was an installation in the form of a multi-media funhouse and cinematic laboratory.   Augmented Reality attractions such as the “Chamber of Hollowfields” and “Kaberet of Kinomorphosis”, as well as a gallery of various optical phenomena, were on exhibit for patrons to investigate the intertwining phenomena of perception, illumination, perspective and illusion.

Inside the Chamber of Hollowfields

Hollowfields being installed

Hollowfields being installed

Inside the Chamber of Hollowfields

Inside the Chamber of Hollowfields

Inside the Chamber of Hollowfields

Inside the Chamber of Hollowfields

Hollowfields at CMU

Hollowfields at CMU

Hollowfields concept

This mulit-channel video-installation is comprised of many layers of translucent screens through which 3D animated computer animations are projected. The animations are calculated to play with the users sense of perspective, and the resulting experience is one of floating within a multi-dimensional, animated space.

It was originally displayed at Edinboro Univerity in 1998 in collaboartion with Sound artist Rick Gribenas, and has since won awards and been commisioned by Carnegie Mellon University’s Art gallery, The City of Montreal (Maison de la Culture, Nuit Blanche), the Halifax Go North art festival and is featured in my Montreal funhouse, the Lumenarium.

Press

“…provides an experience of space, one that the visitor may immerse in. .. Standing in their midst, surrounded by sound and visions of, among other things, tumbling binary numbers or dashing patches of light, is akin to being in the center of a video game…he liberates both his animation and the viewer…” -Pittsburgh Post Gazette

“ Entering the gallery is like entering the space inside a projected movie. Animated imagery runs amok through multiple layers of strategically hung scrims of cheesecloth blurring the line between real and digital space…By splitting and combining imagery, the piece creates an entire environment that breaks down the normal expectations of projected imagery on movie screens…” -Pittsburgh Tribune Review

“Le tout crée un effet de profondeur et de mouvement que le visiteur peut explorer en se promenant à travers les bandes. L’environnement change constamment, plongeant le public tantôt dans une pluie d’étoiles filantes, tantôt dans des arcades mouvantes qui étourdissent et rappellent, effectivement, les flashes et visions hypnotiques qui accompagnent l’arrivée du sommeil.” - Montreal Express

project specs here

Kokoromi & Porous Lab present NOIA at the Montreal Biennial

Kokoromi & Porous Lab present NOIA at the Montreal Biennial

Kokoromi & Porous Lab present NOIA at the Montreal Biennial

Kokoromi & Porous Lab present NOIA at the Montreal Biennial

Kokoromi & Porous Lab present NOIA at the Montreal Biennial

Kokoromi & Porous Lab present NOIA at the Montreal Biennial

Kokoromi & Porous Lab present NOIA at the Montreal Biennial

Photos by Conception Levy

I vj for several Montreal bands (using a multi-layered screen set-up)  including 8-bit psych-rock outfit NOIA . The video below shows one of these performances…

This was a video I made for a trailer-remix contest at Wired for the Scanner Darkly movie. Didn’t win the contest, but had fun making it…