As a Game Designer on Far Cry 6, I owned several systems. The features I’m most proud of having worked on are Bribing Double Agents and the Guerrilla Camp System and 6 Camp Facility Buildings that can be constructed within each of the 3 Guerrilla Camp locations. Please note that I left Ubisoft Toronto before the Beta milestone, and my colleague, Game Designer Sanaa Memon, took over my features and did a fantastic job owning and driving them to the finish line.

Bribing Double Agents can be seen in action in the first video embedded on this page. The goal of Bribing was to leverage the brand-new Holstering feature, that allows the player explore the island of Yara in non-violent ways. Bribing immerses the player in finding, meeting, and trading money for information with Double Agent NPCs who are covertly betraying the military by helping the player-aligned Guerrilla fighters. If the player observes their surroundings and keeps their weapon holstered, they can safely approach and pay Double Agents for Intel Markers that get added to their Map. Intel is a legacy Far Cry system that veteran players know, but I’d argue that we extended the system in an exciting, immersive, and innovative way with Bribing — one that speaks to the “Guerrilla Fantasy” that was a key pillar of the Far Cry 6 player experience.

I worked with various Technical Design, Audio Design, Character Art, Animation, Narrative Design, UI Design, UI Art, UI Programming, Voice Design, Quality Control, and AI Programming team members to implement this feature. A big shoutout to Narrative Designer, Nuha Alkadi, who was my counterpart and co-owner for this system on the Narrative side.

The Guerrilla Camp System and its Facility Buildings can be also be seen in the embedded videos on this page. The key aims with the Guerrilla Camp System were to integrate the player’s “core skills progression” into the physical environment, contextualizing what was (in previous Far Cry games) an abstracted menu screen where the player would spend skill points earned through mastery to unlock enhancements or tools. It also provided a place to spend “world resource“ soft currencies (Gasoline, Medicine, and Metal) salvaged throughout the world. Spending these currencies allows players to construct 6 specially-themed Facility Buildings, each with a unique area of focus. Each Facility Building can be upgraded 3 times to unlock additional bonuses, exclusive equipment, and more.

• La Cantina allows players to trade Animal and Fish Meat for cooked Meals that grant timed Buffs that tie into Far Cry 6’s brand new RPG-style combat system.
• The Hunting Lodge & Fishing Hut extend the player’s capabilities in these gameplay loops, help guide players to Hunting and Fishing Spots in the world, and even offer unique equipment that has specially-themed Perks.
• The Hideout Network adds additional Fast Travel locations to the world and grants the Wingsuit tool, allowing the player to do skydive-style Air Drops into any Fast Travel location.
• The Guerrilla Garrison arms friendly Guerrilla NPCs with better weaponry the more it is upgraded, as well as adding Recon Laptops to the perimeter of FND Bases (Outposts) that reveal the locations of Trip Wires, Auto-Turrets, Security Cameras, and more.
• The Bandito Barracks helps players enlist more Bandito Recruits to send out on Los Banditos missions (a real-time choose-your-own adventure metagame within Far Cry 6) and grant a higher likelihood of successful Los Banditos mission outcomes.

To implement the Guerrilla Camp System and the accompanying Facility Buildings, I worked with various Technical Design, Technical Art, Audio Design, Character Art, Animation, Narrative Design, UI Design, UI Art, UI Programming, Voice Design, Quality Control, Programming, Cinematics, Level Design, Level Art, Concept Art, and Realization team members. This also involved close collaboration with staff at partner studios across the globe, in Montreal, Berlin, and Kyiv.

The Guerrilla Camp System was by far the largest collection of interconnected systems I’ve ever designed and owned and I learned a lot in the process. There are so many people who are key to its successes, but I want to highlight the efforts of Game Designer Sanaa Memon and UX Designer Filipe Seabra. I’ve already mentioned Sanaa’s contributions to taking over the system after my departure, but Fil was a key contributor from the start, chiefly because the player-facing access points and inner workings of the system(s) here are so UI-dependent. Finally, I owe the biggest thank you to Team Lead Game Designer, Andy Schmoll, who was my direct manager. Their design guidance and superhuman management skills helped produce everything you see on this page.

As a Senior Level Designer on Far Cry 5, I was brought on take full ownership of 2 mainline narrative story missions in Toronto’s Whitetail Mountains open world region during the early months of our post-alpha phase.

I took over Get Free from Senior Level Designer Tim Davies and Casualties of War from Senior Level Designer Peter Gelencser, both of whom provided excellent mission pitches, early layouts, and gameplay scripting, making it easy for me to take the layouts and missions to beta and, finally, to gold master.

I worked with Senior Level Artists Iain Gordon and Frank Trzcinski on Get Free and Casaulties of War, respectively, to sculpt terrain, shape layouts, and to collaborate on cover and setdressing passes. Senior Visual Effects Artist John Lee and Senior Lighting Artist Taeha Park also helped immensely in finalizing the intense escape section of Casualties of War, in which we worked together to showcase the catastrophic loss of pressure and flooding of the McKinley Dam Bunker as Players moved through it.

GET FREE

In Get Free, players must infiltrate the Grandview Hotel to rescue an allied militia member named Briggs. Players are free to approach the Hotel from any side they choose, whether approaching from the road, from a lake, or the remaining sides. Each approach has its own cover layouts, unique points of interest, and friction by way of enemy patrols. The Hotel itself is a 3-storey building with wraparound baclonies and many entry points through windows and doorways. The interior is made up of approximately 70% playable spaces in the form of a grand foyer, a kitchen, a laundry room (locked up with some goodies if Players can find a way inside), a lounge, and many hotel rooms. It also features building-height squared spiral staircases flanking either side of the foyer.

One Players rescue Briggs in the “conversion room“ (he’s located on the top floor, inside a hotel room) where he’s being brainwashed with special music that activates a “psychological trigger” when the villain commands it, Players switch the music to begin “deprogramming” Briggs. The music accidentally is played over loud speakers throughout the Hotel, attracting the attention of everyone in the area — the villain finds out and sends a small army of ground troops, vehicles with mounted turrets, and even helicopters to kill Briggs and the Player.

Players must hold the Grandview Hotel, while Briggs is being deprogrammed, as enemies lay seige from the south, north, and south side again, in successively more challenging waves of enemies. Players are free to defend however they like; be it setting traps throughout the interior or using the mounted Heavy Machine Gun or Mortar Launcher placements on the exterior. The waves of enemies use almost every enemy archetype (I decided to avoid melee-focused archetypes since their combat behaviours bypassed cover and prioritised rushing in and killed Briggs far too quickly) and combat-focused vehicle in the game.

CASUALTIES OF WAR

In Casualties of War, Players have just killed the region’s villain (Jacob Seed) and must infiltrate the McKinley Dam Bunker, where the villain’s remaining forces have holed up with another allied prisoner of the region’s war, Deputy Pratt. (Pratt is also a victim of the villain’s brainwashing and mental torture.)

Players arrive at the Bunker’s entry, which is just off a main road and built into the side (and underneath) a mountain connected to the McKinley Dam. The Bunker interior is locked up to this point but after fighting (or sneaking past) guards outside, Players use Jacob’s key and descend deep underground to find and rescue Pratt. To reach Pratt, players will move through a linear series of connected rooms: a Barracks room, a Mess Hall kitchen, a Storage Room, a Control Room, an Armoury, and a Laboratory. Once they reach him, Pratt has a psychotic break from the torture inflicted by Jacob and shoots and destroys turbines that are vital to regulating the pressure and passage of water at the McKinley Dam, causing the Bunker to begin to flood. Players must escape with Pratt (he follows, participates in combat, and supports a “Downed But Not Out” state Players can revive him from) through a new linear series of Pump Rooms that connect back to the original Barracks area and also back to the surface at the Bunker’s exterior.

The Bunker’s interior was made using modular kits (with a few exceptions they are all one-storey rooms) and is comprised of 3 “layers.” Frank and I used a unique 2-tone colour scheme for each floor’s walls and readable signage above doorways (as well as signs with arrows at major junctions) to help Players find and navigate to key rooms mentioned in on-screen objectives; a must for a more linear mission that takes place underground. Even though the kit was somewhat cramped, Frank and I worked to provide cover opportunities that allowed Players to slip past enemies patrolling inside the Bunker if they wanted to sneak past everyone on their way to Pratt. Because the Bunker’s interior was more linear, and we knew Players would experience major rooms in the same order as they played, it presented us with lots of opportunities to dedicate extra effort to environmental storytelling: one example of which is a lectern with chairs gathered in a semi-circle where Players might imagine Jacob delivering sermons to soldiers under his command.

As a Level Designer on Watch Dogs 2, I worked on the main campaign mission entitled Man Versus Machine.  I've included an abridged walkthrough of the mission where I talk over gameplay footage you can watch by clicking here. It's also embedded on this page, if you look to the right of this text.

This mission takes place in the TIDIS Corporate HQ in the Silicon Valley district. I worked with level artists Jonathan Wiley and Sarah Cole-Megaro to design all interior and exterior spaces, starting from the initial whitebox geometry of the building campus and then worked inwards, covering mission interiors as we developed the pitch for the mission.

The mission has 3 major beats; the starting and end sections of this mission have the player taking control of exotic robots that are exclusive to this mission. I worked with game designer Michael Surya and gameplay programmer Sergio Juarez to pitch and iterate on the design for both of these robots.

In the 4-Player CO-OP mission "Les Enragés," players are tasked with infiltrating a heavily-guarded Asylum, liberating captive Assassin colleagues from basement cellblocks, and ending the mission by assassinating the mad priest Jacques Roux.

As the Level Designer who owned this mission, I designed the layout of the interior spaces in the Asylum, the layout of the Asylum's exterior grounds, and scripted the mission logic and NPC encounters. I also maintained the mission area's navmesh and related data layers. If you need more details about this mission or my work, visit my contact page and get in touch.

Here's a video of someone (not me!) playing the mission. Enjoy!

As an Embedded Level Design Quality Control Tester, I was responsible for all aspects of QC with respect to the level design and level art for 3 Single-Player maps: Safehouse, Abandoned Mill, and LNG Terminal. 

Most likely due to overexposure to so many level designers, I somehow morphed into a level designer myself, after Blacklist wrapped. If you need more details, visit my contact page and get in touch.