MINDSEYE

CAMPAIGN

MindsEye Official Launch Trailer (2025)

As Lead Level Designer on MindsEye, I guided development on 12 campaign missions, leading a 12-person team responsible for designing and building gameplay experiences across the campaign.

My role evolved over the course of the project: beginning with direct design contribution on two missions before transitioning into a broader leadership position focused on team direction, pipeline definition, and cross-discipline collaboration. This shift involved handing off missions to team members I had hired and mentored, ensuring continuity while my responsibilities scaled to encompass the wider project.

My responsibilities included:

Defining content design direction and establishing design standards across the campaign.
Working directly with the Game Director on production workflows and content strategy.
Establishing production pipelines with the Audio, Character Art, AI, Props, Vehicles, and Narrative departments.
Leading tool integration direction for the creator pipeline used to deliver playable content.
Hiring designers and supporting their growth through onboarding, mentorship, and performance reviews.
Ensuring milestones were met to a high quality bar, with levels that aligned with the game's creative direction.

The recordings below reflect the design and scripting work of the level owners on my team, alongside contributions from Art, VFX, SFX, Code, Game Design, 3Cs, and others.

DESIGN WORK

Direct design contributions: layout, combat, scripting, and iteration.

THE END OF THE WORLD

Recording of mission (8:01:35 - 8:08:23)

The End of the World is the closing mission of MindsEye's campaign, designed to deliver a climactic, high-intensity conclusion to the story. By the time the player reaches the level, they will have access to the best weapons and drone abilities which shaped every combat encounter and space design decision from the ground up.

My role:

Ownership of encounter scripting, combat space iteration and objective structuring before handover. As my responsibilities expanded, I transitioned direct ownership to a member of my team, who continued development under my guidance before passing to the Technical Design team for final technical implementation.

Key challenge:
Designing combat encounters that provided meaningful resistance against a fully upgraded player without breaking pacing or forcing the player into extended stalemates.

Reflection:

Combat tuning for a fully upgraded player required close collaboration with the narrative team to find a solution for the combatants that served both gameplay and story, resulting in a revised enemy mix that improved pacing in subsequent playtests.

MAN ALWAYS BURNS

Recording of mission (2:17:06 - 2:20:44)

Man Always Burns was a late-stage addition to the campaign. The brief asked for a mission that reinforced the protagonist's role as a Silva Corp. employee in-between high-stakes personal endeavors.

My role:

Designing and prototyping layout, gameplay, and combat. As my responsibilities expanded across the broader project, I transitioned direct ownership to a member of my team, from which point my role became guiding layout iteration, pacing direction, and combat adjustments throughout the rest of development and serving as the primary point of escalation when the designer was blocked. I was also responsible for maintaining narrative and design compliance across major scope changes. We worked closely with the Technical Design team who did the final technical implementation.

Key challenges:

I was given a restriction that the mission had to take place within an existing warehouse building in an industrial area, which at the time had no interior, lighting, and was a completely blank space which provided some pros and cons in the prototyping phase, giving me a large degree of creative freedom in how to utilize the space, but it came at the price of technical challenges due to the lighting, collisions and the limited capabilities of the tool at the time. Working within these limitations I managed to secure the approval of the prototype from the Design and Game Directors and continued building the mission with one of my designers.

Late in development, the environment underwent a significant expansion, substantially larger than the original space. I worked closely with my designer to restructure the layout around the new geometry without losing the mission's pacing or identity, while simultaneously resolving a series of blockers including missing assets, technical integration challenges and balancing art and gameplay requirements within the redesigned space.

Reflection:

Playtests after the environment change confirmed the level remained fun and well-paced despite the significant changes which I attribute to the close collaboration with the Art dept. throughout the redesign process.

Another campaign mission designed and built by me unfortunately did not end up making it to launch, details under NDA.

AS LEAD

Guiding design development: design direction, reviews, and cross-discipline coordination.

LIGHTS IN THE SKY

Recording of mission (5:08:05 - 5:21:03)

Watch Relays arrives in the second half of the campaign at a pivotal narrative turning point: the moment martial law is enacted, fundamentally shifting the tone and stakes of the game world. The mission's primary design brief was to communicate this shift to the player, setting up the next world stage, another area my team was responsible for. I oversaw the development of this level with one of my level designers as the mission owner.

My role:

Guided layout direction, encounter setup and pacing.
Maintained narrative compliance throughout iteration.
Served as the primary point of contact between my team and Directors.
Managed sprint scheduling, dependencies, and workload allocation across the mission and wider team commitments.

Key challenges:

The level used a hybrid development approach combining the in-house editor with standard UE5 workflows, which required significant technical coordination due to technical challenges with combat encounter scripting. We resolves these via efficient communication and close iteration with the Technical Design team.

Reflection:

The mission demonstrated that the hybrid workflow could be sustained at production quality and validated the approach for the toolset's broader use across the project.

SAVE WHO YOU CAN

Recording of mission (6:34:14 - 6:38:06)

Save Who You Can is one of the later missions in the campaign. The mission was fully redesigned by my team using the ARCADIA toolset. Since the work came to us late in production, the design had to work with the already fixed start and end points, a locked narrative, and a finalised environment layout.

My role:

Guided layout direction, encounter setup and pacing.
Maintained narrative compliance throughout iteration.
Served as the primary point of contact between my team and Directors.
Managed sprint scheduling, dependencies and workload allocation across the mission and wider team commitments.

Key Challenge:

The mission had to be delivered under one of the tightest timelines on the project. ARCADIA, while faster to iterate in, it still had limitations that required close collaboration with the tool development team to resolve. I coordinated closely with the team to arrange the necessary functionality, managing priorities across simultaneous team commitments.

Reflection:

The mission was delivered on schedule and became one of the more complex experiences built exclusively within ARCADIA demonstrating both the tool's viability for late-stage production work and the team's ability to execute under significant pressure.

LAMRIE'S SECRETS

Recording of mission (7:36:42 - 7:53:31)

Lamrie's Secrets is the second-to-last mission in the campaign, set at the Area S military base outside of Redrock. My team was responsible for designing the mission within an already existing open-world location.

My role:

Guided layout direction, encounter setup and pacing.
Supervised Art dependency management and asset integration.
Served as the primary unblocking point for my designer across multiple parallel workstreams.

Key Challenges:

The open world location featured vast open areas with long sight lines, making on-foot navigation slow and combat exposure difficult to control. Resolved through close collaboration with Art to reshape the space for gameplay while preserving the environment's character.
The mission introduced a sniper rifle, a unique weapon requiring special combat setup due to technical constraints, which affected how encounters had to be structured and spaced.
The player's companion (Rigby) had to be factored into all combat balancing as they are not allowed to die. Their extra firepower and distraction capability had to be taken into account when setting up the encounters. Drones were introduced to periodically force the player out of cover and maintain forward momentum.
The brief included designing background ambience to make the base feel credibly alive: aircraft in the distance, jets taking off, military vehicles in motion. Many assets required reworks at the time, which provided the challenge of keeping development moving while managing these dependencies alongside everything else the team was delivering.

Reflection:

The ambience work successfully brought the base to life, making it feel credibly active and inhabited in a way that served the mission's setting. While a portion of the newly designed path was cut late in development, most of the team's design made it through to release.

CROSS-TEAM CONTRIBUTIONS

Collaborative development: my team's contributions to missions owned by other teams.

SOLAR IMPLANT

Recording of mission (3:30:21 - 3:39:38)

Install Solar takes the player to a solar farm to install one of Morrison's ODTs. My team's brief was to design and prototype combat encounters for an already locked open-world environment (a recurring constraint) using the existing layout. The gameplay here was based around dynamic cover objects: moving forklifts, automated platforms and maintenance equipment to freshen up the combat loop in a way that felt native to the environment.

Contribution scope: Combat encounter design and prototyping, including dynamic cover setup using moving environmental objects. Final implementation was handed to the Technical Design team, who refined the encounters using expanded AI control functionality unavailable to us at the time.
Challenge: Dynamic cover introduced a set of unique technical problems on both sides of the interaction. AI pathfinding and cover usage had to be tuned for moving objects, the player controller needed to handle being displaced by equipment without getting stuck, and the unpredictability of moving geometry required extensive targeted testing with QA.
Reflection: The dynamic cover system underwent significant cuts late in development, with most elements removed before release. While the full vision didn't survive the final production stretch, the work demonstrated the viability of the approach within the engine and toolset constraints and paved the way for similar setups elsewhere.

SEND THEM ALL TO HADES

Recording of mission (6:11:30 - 6:13:34)

In Send Them All to Hades, the player returns to the factory to launch a second rocket. To do this, they need to use a helicopter to clear occupying military forces from the factory grounds. My team's contribution covers the sequence between 6:11:30 and 6:13:34 one of the earliest deployments of the ARCADIA toolset within the campaign, making it a technically significant moment in the project's production history beyond its gameplay contribution alone.

Contribution scope: Combat encounters along the path to the helicopter, designed and implemented within an already finalised open-world environment.
Challenge: The level layout was locked by the time my team was assigned, with the open world environment leaving no room for structural changes. The work required designing meaningful combat encounters using the existing layout, identifying and adding cover points to support combat pacing that felt natural to the space.
Outcome: The encounters added purposeful resistance along a path that previously had none, making the factory feel credibly occupied and giving the player a sense of agency on the approach to the objective. A small contribution in scope but one that meaningfully changed the feel of the sequence and led to the wider adaptation of the toolset.

SECRET WEAPON LOCATION

My team assisted the Technical Design team with combat encounter design along the mission route, implementing a number of self-contained encounters that had to integrate with existing setups. The collaboration required close coordination to ensure our encounters felt organic within the wider mission flow, complementing rather than conflicting with the Technical Design team's work.

Beyond combat, my team also designed and scripted a range of ambient interactions to bring the space to life: soldiers moving out of the base in formation, military drones navigating maintenance tunnels and physics-based floating Kin artifacts. My role was to guide layout and combat design through regular reviews, manage asset integration and dependency pipelines and coordinate scheduling across dynamically allocated designers who contributed to this mission throughout the shifting priorities of development.

A TANGO WITH CHARLIE

A Tango with Charlie was one of the first driving missions my team contributed to It introduced a distinct set of design challenges compared to the on-foot encounters we had been building before it. Encounter design had to account for the performance demands of streaming content in and out at driving speeds, requiring careful coordination with Art and the technical teams around asset loading. AI setup also had to be reworked to handle fast-moving targets effectively.

A VITAL EXTRACTION

Very similar to Tango With Charlie, my team designed the roadblocks along the drive as well as some physics-based elements to introduce variety to combat and help communicate the mystical nature of the location. My contribution was guiding layout and combat design through regular reviews, handling dependency management and the asset integration pipeline and serving as the primary unblocking point for my designer across multiple parallel workstreams.

THE ZIGGURAT

Arranged functionality and supervised the design of physics-based interactive wayfinding elements and a puzzle sequence. The wayfinding elements (shootable cubes visible in the footage above) made it to the final release, the puzzle sequence did not.

IN PURSUIT OF THE ORB

My team prototyped combat encounters for the sequence in which the player explores the map freely in a military helicopter. The work did not make the final release.

My contribution was guiding layout and combat design through regular reviews, handling dependency management and the asset integration pipeline, and serving as the primary unblocking point for my designer across multiple parallel workstreams.