Ever since I played my first computer video game "The settlers" and later discovered the "Settlers 2" Level editor, I was fascinated by the creation of virtual worlds. Over the years I learned that in order to create a truly beautiful digital world it was not sufficient to build good looking locations and shape authentic landscapes but also to apply rules and fundamental guidelines to a level's design. I learned that the best levels once started as solid colored, blocky layout studies.
While I genuinely enjoy creating beautiful worlds I primarily want to make sure that they provide a worthwhile play experience. Doing that I also set myself the task of learning to not just use the tools I'm given but also look behind the scenes and improve them by bringing in my own ideas. For that reason I chose to write about "possibilities of process optimization in the development of a video game" in my bachelor thesis.
Generally speaking, I enjoy working on a particular set of skills without losing the big picture and learning new things. Despite or maybe thanks to gathering this knowledge and maintaining a bigger picture I play games with a great passion.
Level Design Resume
I am:
• 25 years old, born in 1984
• A passionate developer and player with a B.Sc. in game design
• Able to come up with concepts and ideas and put them into practise
• Able to define requirements of tools based on game design decisions and develop these tools
• Am used to to track down problems and solve them, even if they are not part of my responsibilities
• Am used to working in a team and meeting deadlines
• Able to learn new tools and pick up new concepts quickly
• Able to lead and guide a team, define goals and oversee their completion
Proficiencies:
Level Editors:
• Valve’s Hammer Editor
• Battlefield 1942's Battlecraft Editor
• UnrealED
• Sandbox1,2
Art Tools:
• Autodesk 3dsMax
• Softimage XSI
• ZBrush
• Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash
• Macromedia Freehand
Programming and Version Control Tools:
• MS Visual Studio (C++, C#), XCode and GnuDB, Eclipse
• Tortoise SVN client and server administration
Student game experience:
• Mighty Space Miners
• Sl*t - the game
• TowelTwister, a multiplayer game based on the Shark3D engine
• Educational games for the "Landesmuseum Hannover" on a DELL Axim Handheld
• Experimental multiplayer game, based on Virtools
Mod Experience:
• Battlefield1942,
Eve of destruction - Level Design (custom)
• CounterStrike, DoD, DoD:S - Level Design (custom)
•
Project Valkyrie - 3D artist
•
Resistance And Liberation - Game and Level Design, 3d artist, Managment and Administration
xbla prototype:
• unannounced game made by
Binary Madness
Education:
3 years of studies, graduated with a B.Sc. Gamedesign at Mediadesign Hochschule (MD.H) Berlin
Videos
* Panzerhaubitze 2000 - a project a fellow student and I created.
Music: Richard Strauss - "Also sprach Zarathustra"
* Panzerhaubitze 2000 - low resolution
Flash games
* Mighty Space Miners - a flash game I created with two fellow students as a project for university.
* Sl*t - The Game - a flash based game that I helped create. It was used as promo game for a new album of the german band "Slut". Despite the rather unusual name this band makes pop music.
Maps
* Mental Asylum - The first version of my first campaign for the Valve game "Left 4 Dead". The map is also available at L4DMaps.com
Trailers
* RnL trailer - The 2007 christmas trailer for the HL2 mod Resistance and Liberation - the mod download can be found here.
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BMW 760i - 2008
I created this model in order to learn 3DS max high poly modeling. The reference is a BMW 760i from 2005.
The carpaint material is a Shellac material available at
CGTalk.
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Audi S3 2008 - 2009
This is the model of a Audi S3 from 2008.
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PZH 2000 - 2008
The PZH 2000 was modeled with a fellow student as final test of our 3D class in university.
While he was responsible for building the turret and the animations I modeled the body, UVed the finished mesh and created the camouflage texture sheet.
The result of this work is a video that can be downloaded
here.
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Tire and Rims - 2008
I modeled this set of a tire and rims as preparation for larger models, like the BMW I used it for.
The tire bump map is from a tutorial.
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Skyboxes - 2009
This is a collection of skyboxes I made for the HL2 mod Resistance and Liberation.
The process involved the tools: Terragen1 and 2, Photoshop and HDRshop.
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Gulf Of Krimsekistan - 2008
Gulf of Krimsekistan is a multiplayer map for the game "Settlers - Rise of an Empire".
It features 2 traders on each side of the bay who are the only resources for trade goods that are vital to the game's progress and winning the game later.
I created it during the level design course in university together with a fellow student. We both designed it but had to come up with a build of it on our own as result.
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St Come Du Mont - 2008
St. Come du Mont was one of the areas to be captured by the allied paratroopers who landed in the Normandy. It was my first map for Resistance and Liberation.
The challenge I faced creating this map was to make a large outdoor area style level with a tool set and an engine that was optimized to do indoor and medium sized outdoor levels.
Another challenge was the indoor lighting. The Source engine is particularly weak when it comes to bounce lights, especially with it's default bounce lights, resulting in extremely dark indoor areas even when those have windows to the brightly lit outside.
In order to still have good looking indoor areas that are not all lit by artificial light sources (who turns on lamps at daytime anyway?) I had to cheat a little and use a number of carefully placed and set up spot lights infront of each window to fake a proper lighting.
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Mental Asylum Sewers - 2010
This is the second of five maps in my campaign for the Valve game
"Left 4 Dead".
It leads the four players through a sewer system, up into an apartment block and concludes in an underground carpark of a hotel that serves as location of the third map.
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Mental Asylum Subway - 2009
The first of 5 map of my
"Left 4 Dead" campaign.
The players start in the control room of a subway station. They have to make their way through the large station and the outbound tunnels in order to get into a flooded part of the city's sewers. The sewers are the location of the following map
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Window 01 - 2008
This is a simple prop window that I made for the mod RnL. It features four different versions to account for most of the possible uses.
3 outdoor versions, closed, with fake background and open for use as real window in a open building and 1 closed version.
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Stair Case - 2008
The staircase of the german castle "Wachsenburg" which is part of my next Resistance and Liberation map.
The roof texture is a HalfLife2 texture, which I used to preserves consistency of the castle roof textures.
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Table - 2009
I made this table for an upcoming RnL map based on the german castle "Wachsenburg".
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Prussian P38 - 2010
One of my "
Resistance and Liberation" maps is featuring a train station, yet no trainstation would be perfect without a train, so I researched what would be most common in a WW2 setting and found this Prussian P8, commonly refered to as P38, too.
As opposed to the high poly howitzer and car models this model was meant to be an ingame prop, which means I had to limit the use of tris and textures to a reasonable amount for the Source Engine.
The locomotive and tender combined have 3 large and 1 small texture sheets and roughly 11700 polys.
The base textures I used to create the sheets are taken from
CG Textures.com
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Plank Bed - 2009
This plank bed is a prop for a prison cell in a medieval castle map.
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Fire Place - 2007
Just another prop model to enlarge the furniture repository of RnL.
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Dieppe - 2010
Dieppe is my latest map for the HL2 mod RnL.
It features newly implemented gameplay modes like objective destruction and will force both teams to both attack their targets while defending the enemy's targets.
It is still a "work on progress", so some screenshots show the grey texture used to layout the entire map and it's missing quite some detail.
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Bath House - 2009
The bath house level is part of a small game that I developed with a team of fellow students.
We were presented with an engine called
Shark 3D that no one of use knew to that date and after a brief introduction of it's capabilites, limits and workflow we were assigned the task to develop a game within 5 weeks.
We chose to create a multiplayer game that featured an "Gears of War" like annex point gameplay.
My task was to develop a level that worked for up to 16 people. That included:
- creating a working layout
- position all necessary entities
- creating the textures
- scripting the gameplay, including timers, collision detection for the triggers and the gameplay logic for pickups like armor and "regeneration zones" that refilled the player's health.
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LevelEditor - 2008
I programmed this level editor with C# as a tool for the development of a Flash based
promo game that I helped working on during my studies.
My responsibilities during the development were:
- helping to come up with and refining a design fit for a 2D sidescroller music game.
- identify the needs of the artists and the requirements of the gamedesign for a level editor.
- develop and maintain a flexible editor to create multiple levels with different settings and entities
- design a XML based format for storing the information of the levels
- implement an interface that is capable of reading and processing the level information
- work closely together with another programmer to implement the collision of the game and program a collision editor to create the game's collision meshes.
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TNT - 2010
A texture I made in order to finish the TnT model a member of the RnL team made.
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Waco Glider - 2010
A RnL team member found this Waco Glider in one of our old backups. It was not unwrapped, so I decided to finish it.
stefan-be@web.de