Star Citizen - Cloud Imperium Games
During my time at Cloud Imperium Games, I worked on Star Citizen’s Persistent Universe, the part of the game with the explorable planets, cities, and space stations. I joined as a Level Designer and later became a Senior Level Designer.
Most of my time went into designing locations, from small outposts on moons to large cities like Area 18 and Orison. I also worked on the CitizenCon demos in 2017 and 2019, helped train junior level designers, and gave a lot of feedback on the tool we used to build modular locations.
My Role
Position: Level Designer, later Senior Level Designer
Scope: Location design, CitizenCon demos, and mentoring junior designers
Duration: June 2016 – March 2021
Locations
Surface Outposts
The surface outposts are small bases on planets and moons, used as mission hubs and trading posts. I worked on them from the first concept through to final implementation.
The outposts became the base template for small locations in the Persistent Universe, so a large part of the work was also writing documentation and setting up workflows that the rest of the team could use.
Rest Stops
The rest stops are stations in orbit where players can refuel and respawn. I did the original layout and whitebox, working out the spatial layout and how players would move through the station.
After that, I worked with another designer to turn the layouts into pieces for the modular tools, which set the base for how we laid out the orbital stations.
Area 18
Area 18 is the cyberpunk city on ArcCorp. I owned the level design for it, working within the art direction that was already in place.
The main part of the work was redesigning the layout of the different districts to make the city easier to navigate. Since it is a busy social hub, the challenge was keeping it visually dense while still making it easy to find your way around and keeping performance where it needed to be.
Orison
Orison is the cloud city floating in the atmosphere of Crusader. I worked on it from concept to greybox, but left the company before it was finished.
I designed the first vertical layout and how players get between the floating platforms, and worked with the art team on how the platforms should look. Because the city is spread out over several levels, a lot of the work was figuring out how players would move between them.
Other Work
CitizenCon Demos
2017: I supported our senior level designer on the Persistent Universe demo showing Area 18 and Lorville, helping with the spatial design and level implementation.
2019: I was the main level designer on the Persistent Universe demo sequences, including the jump point wormhole transition, and was responsible for the layout and how the sequences played.
Modular Location Tool
Throughout my time there, I gave feedback and design requirements for Cloud Imperium’s internal tool for building modular locations, which helped shape the workflows the level design team used with it.