Magicka 2

Action Adventure, Multi-Platform

Pieces Interactive

Lead game designer, gameplay designer, level designer and writer on Magicka 2, an action adventure co-op game released by Paradox Interactive. Find it on Steam here.

During this project I put on many hats, one of which being a writer, both in terms of much of the over-arching story as well as the specifics and dialog.

I tried my best to be inclusive and diverse in my writing whereever I could. I believe this made the resulting game more interesting and broadly relatable (as much as a chaotic top-down wizard murder simulator can be) in the end.

The design included fairly cost effective replayability in the form of "artifacts" (optional modifiers to balance and mechanics) and "familiars" (pets that add their own twist), in addition to the usual equippable gear, giving the players a lot of variables to play with.

The game takes place over a number of different worlds (forests, caves, snowy mountains, and so on) with their own inhabitants with their own unique attacks, abilities, mobility and aggressiveness. This aims to force the players to adapt their play-styles and not rely solely on one or two spells throughout the game.

This broad palette of different monsters also comes in handy in the various challenge maps. Maps where you must survive a number of waves of different enemies, always trying to surprise you and trip you up with their compositions.

These are some level design documents from the beginning of the game, showing either artist concept (based on earlier design sketch) or in-game rendering overlayed with event notes and comments.

I left Pieces Interactive in 2014 and couldn't find many documents from that time.

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