Level Design

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.