Last Expedition - Principal Level Designer
I was the sole level designer on Last Expedition. I had the pleasure of taking an old prototype from Certain Affinity and re-imagining a randomized tile-based level system into a one world battle arena named Aura. Four teams of four descend upon this remote world, long abandoned by human colonists, hoping to scavenge alien technology that coincidentally is mutating the local fauna into horrific beasts.
I worked extremely close with colleagues across a range of disciplines ranging from concept art, AI tooling, environmental art, editor tools, optimization, and game design.
Our goal was to make a varied world with recognizable landmarks and unique biomes while also fitting within the scope of our small team. This worked well with our setting, a sparsely populated long forgotten human colony, and allowed us to reuse the costly man-made assets and lean into the wild overgrowth and alien environment that envelopes it.
Like many other battle royals and extraction shooters, players can find themselves entering and exiting just about anywhere on the map so it was important to offer lots of landmarks to help players understand where they are even if the map is mostly natural. To do this, I used long organic features like streams crossing though the dense jungle or a long trench created by the colonist's large harvesters. Other natural landmarks like overgrown mushrooms, sulfur pools, and destructible termite mounds also populate the level. Human structures are either overgrown and abandoned or falling a part in a dramatic fashion, giving players new ways to traverse across the broken outpost.
