There are a few articles I had published on my old site that are no longer relevant and there are also some left unpublished - those might get cleaned up eventually.
For those who are here to actually read about me, I have been a serious hobbyist level designer since around 2007 - I could claim that I was making maps at a much younger age for games like Warcraft, Starcraft and later Age of Empires, but there's no point gloating about that because we can all imagine the pain I put my family through as they were forced to endure my creations.
So 2007 is when it all started, I decided to bite the bullet a start making a map for the game I had spent the last 7 years playing, Urban Terror - a mod of Quake 3 made in the IdTech 3 engine. Learning GTK radiant was quite a struggle at the time with google being new and the concept of YouTube tutorials had not been invented yet, so it was on me to learn from trials and error, my peers and what little documentation I could find..
Nevertheless, as I was tired of repeating the same mapcycle - I was determined to make a good competitive map and I did not give up. After making a few things that never publically were released my first two or three real creations would be considered arena maps, you can see a pivot towards the end of 2007 with my level design where everything I made from here on out tried to cater to a specific type of gameplay. I made my most successful creation to date at this point, Tohunga - which has been a competitive sucess for both Team Survivor and Capture the Flag, while also being balanced for public play too.
I continued to make levels soley for Urban Terror up until about 2012 where I branched out into other engines in order to learn more about game development and level design for other types of games. Farcry 2 was first, followed by Portal 2 and Skyrim.
I would dabble in the Source engine messing with L4D2 and TF2 ideas, though not releasing anything publically. Between 2015-2020 I joined a collection of mod teams and projects all which unfortunately fell upon a similar fate.. most of which I have no work to show for. I returned to Urban Terror around this time to focus soley on competitive team survivor maps, with quite a few of those new releases being recieved well by the community.
Since 2020 I have been working professionally as a level designer for Grinding Gear Games, working exclusively on Path of Exile 2. Eventually, I'll post more about that on this site, but for obvious reasons I can't really post too much other than what is already public. Though I do have to say the realm of procedural level design is mind bending, I love it.
Here is an interview I did recently with Darth Microtransation. Where he asks me some good questions on what it's like to do Level Design for Path of Exile 2.
In my spare time I still enjoy doing level design as a hobby and have found myself branching out and mastering level design for as many different forms of level design as I can. I've found there is a lot to learn when map making for an unfamiliar game, one day I intend on documenting the lessons I've learned across the different types of games I've tried.
Contact: steven [at] delirium [dot] nz