Entropia Universe is a sandbox MMORPG set in a Sci-fi environment, using a real cash economy. The game has been around since 2003 and saw an engine upgrade to CryEngine in 2010. My work has been heavily involved in preparing the new engine upgrade version of the game to Unreal Engine 5.
The upgrade entailed full changes to the world, gameplay and core loops. In many ways, a new game. Due to company changes, the project is currently being reformed into something different than a lot of what is showcased here.
Specification: My Contributions: Tools:
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Studio: MindArk
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Development time: 2 years+
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Engine: Unreal engine 5
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Team size: 61 (ca 40 developers)
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World Direction
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Level & World design
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Game Design
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3D modeling
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Prototyping & Scripting
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Cinematics
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Unreal Engine 5
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Mercuna NavMesh
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Blender
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Adobe Photoshop
World Direction
At MindArk, we believed in an autonomous core for the developers - combined with a softer type of decision-making hierarchy. This meant that anyone with a good idea could bring it to fruition.
Since we were a small studio with a large scope, our Game Director had to shoulder a lot of roles at the same time. To help alleviate this, I took on the role as a proxy World Director, creating our foundation for how-to-level-design our worlds specifically. This also entailed a lot of pacing and flow decisions - to ensure that the spaces could fit enough players and enemies. As well as keep the different areas varied enough to keep it fresh, but not to the degree that the player never felt friction. Below follows a few of the slides on World direction.
Level design
I worked practically with the level design for the worlds we made. After the previous Lead left and before the team grew, I was the sole Level designer on the new game for a period of time. This meant that I was responsible for all level creation, both for production and for testworlds; creating several worlds for different teams to test their own material in. For example Audio, Prototyping, Graphical art, Lighting, Camera-Combat-Controls and more.
As the Level team grew - I created levels specifically for the Designers to use as a backbone for world building. After explaining the concept, we had all Level designers create their own "Mini-world" to showcase that they understood the design choices and flow.
Below is the framework video meant for the designers to work from.
We prepared two different planets to be built, one full size planet (16x16km) and one moon (6x6km). I was the stakeholder for both worlds, making sure that they had proper structures, biomes and timelines. The Level design team as a whole worked and delivered on the map designs. Iteration several times and improving the flow continuously.
Besides testworlds and the main open world. I also worked on HUB-design, architecture, as well as Dungeons & Expeditions (Our design take on traditional Raids).
Below you can see some shots from the dungeon Pridefall which I was the sole designer on. I've done all level & encounter design as well as lighting in this level. The assets are both my own blockouts mixed with more finalized assets from the graphical team in the Greybox and Beta phases.
Blockout Greybox Alpha
Pridefall was in direct connection to a landmark we called "The Pride". Surprisingly enough, this was a savannah pride rock that pierced the sky in the overworld. Playing with this concept, the pride rock acts as the landmark of the dungeon, being covered in eggs and flying creatures that tend to them.
During some initial testing, improvements were made to the flow without cutting the original design idea.
As for the design itself, I wanted the players to have long and gnarly eight-shaped dungeon that brought them back to the beginning. Then, when arriving at the entrance to the dungeon, they get intercepted by the Hive queen, which is the final boss.
A lot of low-level drone scarabs are harvesting and moving crystals away from the room
The third boss room is based around light that shines in on a large center rock. Around this rock, 4 blue eggs are puslating. These are new sentinels ready to hatch. This boss is a DPS check for the players.
Mentoring and Leading
As I took on the role of Lead, it came with the responsibility to make sure all levels were of a consistent standard. To make sure that we got the best design out of everyone but still keep it coherent, I made efforts to enable and empower my other level designers to take choices within a guiding frame.
Using what I learned as a game design teacher, I took a pedagogic approach to teach my team practical theory in both game- & level-design. Partially by holding lectures and presentations on theory and examples. But also doing breakdowns of other levels in games, and reverse engineering them - looking at the core of the design. For the more practical elements of engine knowledge, I recorded videos and held live streams to help my team members understand and learn from my flow, so they could follow along in my reasoning and methods.
I prepared and structured the GDD workshop for all of the designers
Defining and going over different game pleasures helps understand what and why we are building.
A snap from a lecture on Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics.
I prepared and structured the GDD workshop for all of the designers
Game design
At my core I've always been a game designer. I've always viewed Level design as an aesthetic extension of design choices. Due to this and my background in Game design I drove the creation process of our Game Design Document(GDD) for the new game. Pulling in all game designers and directors to a weeks workshop and creating a structure for us to go over each and every mechanic that we had planned for. As well as the vision, target group and much more.
More practically, I've worked with prototyping and scripting. Below you can see some work on dynamic events as well as a controllable day/night cycle that I scripted.