ROLE

Game & Lead Level Designer

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Developed the master level, setting both the size and tone for the majority of the levels.
Designed the flow of combat by ensuring the levels slowly rose in intensity.
Created multiple levels that allowed us to test systems and movement.
Quickly developed character concepts for team synergy, and also created a minor dialogue script for the enemies.
Designed levels focused on narrative progression, but also levels that heavily tested the player’s skills. The levels were structured to follow a natural and believable progression through the facility, allowing the tension to escalate as the player continued deeper inside.
Collaborated closely with the team to ensure that moment-to-moment gameplay stayed consistent with the narrative.
Asset-flipped the drones in order to create a stronger variant, and even created a boss variant to cap off the game.
Collaborated with an artist to retroactively ensure all levels had the same amount of grit for world and narrative consistency.
Tweaked the enemy spawners to compensate for the lack of enemy variety, while also balancing the game for the appropriate level and difficulty setting.

Project Details

YEAR

2025

GENRE

FPS | Looter Shooter

PLATFORM

PlayStation 5 & Pc

TIMEFRAME

9 Weeks

TEAM SIZE

ENGINE

Unreal Engine

Key Contributions

Helped establish the project’s sci-fi tone and overall atmosphere
Lead Level Designer, responsible for guiding level structure and flow
Created the master level, used as a benchmark for polish and quality across other levels
Designed and implemented the game’s boss encounter

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Mood Art

Game Concept

TECHNOMANIA is a chaotic First Person Looter Shooter where you play as a killer robot that has gone rogue inside a massive weapons R&D facility on an island, hellbent on fulfilling its primary purpose: wreaking death and destruction upon its creators using the facility’s large array of experimental weapons.

The gameplay is built around manic weapon collecting and constant movement. The player is rewarded for always fighting and switching weapons; in fact, it is the single way the player can regain any form of health.

Let the mania take hold and decimate your foes. They stand little chance against you in a one-on-one situation, but don’t let them surround you, or they will overwhelm you.

Stay vigilant, as not every weapon will help you in the way you hope. Some are built to create chaos, others have a singular focus. Bob and weave through the action and master the art of gun-collecting mania, or simply sledgehammer your way through the campaign, proving that superior computing power means nothing when the solution can be as simple as hammer meets nail.

Gameplay Design

Gameplay Loop

Shoot. Kill. Loot. Repeat.

The core gameplay philosophy of this game is simple: shoot, kill, and loot — run and gun, never stop, keep going. The next enemy might hold the weapon you truly desire. Death doesn’t belong to you, but to the mortal flesh enemies who dare to use machinery against you.

The fast-paced gameplay, combined with the extremely varied weapons, creates an exciting gameplay loop that changes with each run. Minor roguelite elements within the weapon system force players to stay on their toes and never rely too heavily on a single playstyle.

Progress is locked behind eliminating all enemies in an area before the robot will even consider moving on. Collect the best weapons and restore your health each time you pick up a new one.

Out of ammo? No problem. Throw the empty weapon at your enemies and damage them that way, or get up close and punch them.

And if that’s still not enough, you can always just sledgehammer them.

Guns, guns and even more guns!

The philosophy behind the weapon system was pitched to us as Borderlands x Doom, where hectic gameplay would marry the endless weapon combinations seen in the Borderlands series.

The modular gun system allowed the other designers to create waves upon waves of weapons that drastically alter the way the game plays.

The color associated with each weapon helps the player identify the level of uniqueness it carries. From blue to gold, weak to the ultimate guns that can take down most enemies with just one shot, with the caveat that they carry less ammo and are far harder to find.

The environment is your ally. You can push off walls to leap to higher ledges, or use your jet thrusters to clear gaps between you and your enemy.

In this game, you are the horror, the true villain of the narrative, and must do whatever you can to reach the ultimate goal: the strongest weapon within the facility — the nuclear bomb stored at the heart of the weapons R&D facility.

Guns of TECHNOMANIA

Level Design

Level layout

Violence begets violence!

When I began designing the first level, I knew it had to make a strong statement. It needed character, but it also had to carry clear narrative meaning within the facility. I went through the concept art we had gathered for our mood board and spoke with one of our artists who had already created a tank asset. That conversation immediately sparked an idea.

I jumped into building the Tank Garage level. The goal wasn’t necessarily to create a master level right away, but rather to design a space that captured the mood of the game and grounded the player inside the facility.

Since this was my first real level design—not just a small test room for mechanics like the grappling hook—I knew it would be a fairly large task, but one I took on with genuine excitement.

The first step was establishing the scale of the space. I experimented with different sizes, repeatedly running from one end of the blockout to the other just to feel how large the level actually was. I kept tweaking the dimensions until it finally felt right. Once the scale was set, I began constructing the walls and roof, essentially creating a large structural box that I could start filling with platforms and traversal paths.

The level really began to take shape once I added the repair bays and garage elements. At that point, the vision started becoming clearer. To make the facility feel more believable, I also added a small cafeteria area. Besides helping the world feel lived in, it also gave players a tactical space where they could funnel enemies if they became overwhelmed in the larger combat sections.

From the beginning, I wanted the level to support multiple ways of clearing encounters, allowing players to adapt their approach depending on how chaotic the situation became.

Tank Garage - Level Blockout

Elevation.

Once the base level was created, I then moved on to slowly building the upper deck, as I felt that the level was a little flat. I first added a hanging bridge, which connected to multiple corners of the level, but that didn't look good.

I then added an upper office with a lot of glass to create a distinct contrast between the workers below and the offices above, but the glass seemed to take too much processing power. (This may have been my fault, as I may have been using the wrong assets.) Either way, we continued to tweak the design until we landed on making the level a bit more grungy, without the need for the office space.

After a couple of weeks, the entire team sat down and looked through the various levels that we had blocked out and collectively chose my level to be the master level that is used as a benchmark for quality and polish across the board.

This motivated me to take on a larger level design role and got me creating multiple levels at once, as I felt that the team had shown that they could trust my design.

Final Version of the Tank Garage Level

War is profit.

The final version of the level turned out far greater than I had originally expected. I had left the blockout when it was still in its greybox state and got pleasantly surprised every time I came back to see that the level kept looking more and more polished.

It also helped me understand to what degree I should try to design and what to watch out for, as the master level took a while to complete.

Entrance to the facility – Level Blockout

Outside looking in.

With the new spurred confidence, I began to work on a second level. This one would be set on the outside—actually, it would be the level that leads into the Tank Garage, as I felt that we needed to have some sort of build-up to such an epic level.

I looked at the mood board and found a great image that conveyed the majestic but also brutalist feeling that I wanted to portray. The cold slab would be a great backdrop to the extreme violence produced by the player, and the intense response from the enemies would make this battle arena stand out.

The concept around this level was flat vs elevation, where the player would have to fight their way up a hill. The enemy would begin with the high ground but would soon find themselves on equal ground. The idea was that instead of showing the player how powerful they were, I would design the level to allow the players to actually feel like it due to them crossing overwhelming odds.

An Environmental Artist chose to rework the outside level and made the outside level look wonderful. Albeit, the level lost a large part of its identity—the uphill battle! But I figured that it was better that we had the level than not have the level at all, so I switched focus to work on other levels.

Geothermal Facility - Level Blockout

Fire and brimstone.

Due to a hectic development cycle, we had to scrap a couple of levels, and one of them got destroyed during a fork merge, which was rather tragic. But knowing that I possess both the skill and the ingenuity to create something new, I set myself up to do so.

This time I had one singular mindset: make the entire game click! This was the only true level designed around the player’s movement system, as we had been tweaking it throughout the development, which meant that some levels needed to be tweaked along the cycle. But they never exactly felt like they would fit perfectly.

The Tank Garage came close, but not enough, so with the Geothermal Facility I took the time to set it up so that the players would need to keep an eye on where they had to plant their feet, while also making it open enough for the drones to be able to move unrestricted.

The philosophy of this level was that:

It is the penultimate level of the game, so we had to challenge the player.
You have to prove that you are truly the superior killing machine.

With that in mind, I slowly began tweaking the drones and turrets and managed to create a harder version of the enemies by asset-flipping them. I changed the emission color of the drones and turrets and made them a little bigger than their weaker sibling versions.

Once I managed to tweak that, I then went out of my way to create the game’s boss, the Giga Drone, which would appear at the end of the waves of encounters that the player had to contend with. The drones overwhelmed the players a little, so I tweaked their numbers but also the level so that players could find spots to not only hide but maneuver about and disappear from the drones’ sightlines.

I also hid a bunch of special weapons around that reward players who kept their eyes open, along with a couple of hidden easter eggs.

Final Version of the Geothermal Facility Level

For being a level that wasn't even expected to be part of the game, I feel like I was able to pull off something insane. Our project lead was unsure if we would have time to put it in, as it lacked polish, so I took it upon myself and stayed working on it for 30 hours straight. Ironically, this made it the players’ favorite level, as the level design polish exceeded the previous ones due to learning from the previous levels’ design mistakes.

Foreshadowing.

Another level that got scrapped was the Tank Battle Arena, which was a shame because I had already set up the foreshadowing with the Tank Garage Level. But our artists were running into an overwhelming workload, which forced us to focus on scaling down certain areas, especially the outside arenas, due to the lack of development time.

This turned out to be a good thing in the end because it forced me to recontextualize the ending and even got me to focus on creating a new penultimate level, the Geothermal Facility, which turned out to be a fan favorite.

Albeit, I can't lie and say that I don't wish we had the Tank level as well, as it had a great setup for how the Tank would appear and destroy the tower that would lead to the end, forcing you to have a close-quarters combat fight with an M1 Abrams.

The stakes were supposed to be as high as they have ever been, with humanity making one last desperate attempt to take down the robot—to no avail.

Luckily, I was still able to take a lot of knowledge from that level design and apply it elsewhere.
R.I.P. Tank Battle Arena!

Tank Battle Arena - Level Blockout

Scrapped Levels

Beltway Terminal - Level Blockout

Blast from the past.

One of the levels that was unfortunately scrapped was the Loading Dock level. I had taken great inspiration from my own past, as I have worked for UPS, specifically as an unloader and sorter, so I found great joy in recreating such an environment for a video game setting.

It was a little jarring at first, but with time I managed to create a blockout that functioned well with the movement controller we had worked on. The setup for this level was that your movement was limited, and therefore you would have to focus on using cover and try to flank the enemies instead of brute-forcing.

The level got far into development and was almost complete when we had a merge conflict that somehow cannibalized the level, and for some reason, it was rolled back to a previous part. That hurt a little, but I took this as a great lesson and moved on to work on another level.

Writing

Light drizzle.

Unfortunately on this project my main focus was to create a straight forward narrative that was told by the games visuals and environments rather than by words themselves. This game was not story focused but it did have an emphasis on making the player feel like science gone wrong, which was rather fascinating to write for without having heavy focus on the story.

What I ended up doing was focus on writing dialogues instead so that the enemy would give you context clues, from the way they speak, to the languages that they shouted in, which would give the player the context clue that they are facing the entire world on their own, that humanity desperately needed to combine their force in order to even attempt to stop you from reaching the ultimate weapon.

Now, I wish I had sat down and worked harder on this story but the project needed me to step up as level designer so I had to put all of this on the backbone, albeit I was glad that the voice lines remained which helped me feel like I still had a hand in the narrative.

Power of words

Takeaway

Here's my takeaway...

TECHNOMANIA, aaah where do I even begin? The development was a bit hectic, which forced me to wear multiple hats because we didn't really have the roles set out from the get-go. This sort of bottlenecked a lot of creative decisions, a problem that persisted throughout development and only compounded the closer we got to release—from not fully knowing what the narrative scope would be to uncertainties in the level layout.

Now, did I learn a thing or two from this project? Absolutely. Did I believe in the project? Of course—otherwise I wouldn't have put in all that effort if I didn't. Was it a shame that it was a bit of a structural mess when it came to the hierarchy and the lack of designated developer roles? Yes. But that's the beauty of these projects—you are supposed to learn from your mistakes and evolve as a game developer!

TECHNOMANIA may not be the type of game that I would personally want to play, but it was ironically right up my ballpark to write. However, you can't just write anything if you aren't inspired, which I found ironic because I had a much easier time writing for Plenty of Fish in the Sea than I did writing TECHNOMANIA.

I had plans for continuing to develop the game, but I felt that perhaps it was best to move on, as I was brimming with fresh ideas that I wanted to try out. Luckily, we got the game out in one piece, and I am extremely happy that my levels were generally considered the ones that people enjoyed the most. But I can't take full credit for this—if it weren't for Kevin Björkman & Alexis Retzman making sure that the Tank Garage looked flawless, and Victor Gustavsson and Krister Holmgren polishing the Geothermal Facility, then I am sure a lot of the excitement for the levels would have been somewhat diminished.

じゃ、またね！

CAPTURES FROM GAMEPLAY

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