Ronny Josch
Level Designer
Currently working as a Junior Technical Level Designer at Ubisoft Massive Entertainment
Project Exhibited
A first-player stealth game, set in the Mediterranean 1960s, created in Unreal Engine 4. Featuring branching level design, with many paths the player can take to get to his goal.
Project Highlights:
Created 1/3 of the game's playspaces, creating blockouts, placing A.I., balancing gameplay, while maintaining cross-discipline communication.
Level Design Supervisor
In order to ensure work consistency, it was my responsibility to oversee a team of 5 level designers and to establish all building metrics & rational LD proposals
Game Design
Defined the core user experience, performed competitor analyses (genre & gameplay mechanics) and defined the macro gameplay loop.
Remote Work
Due to COVID-19 our team had to self-sufficiently work from home for half of the game's development time which required a high degree of adaptability
Bit-Buster
A cooperative 2-player twin-stick shooter in which both players share a single projectile. The levels are highly destructible and built out of voxels.
Project Highlights:
Level Design
Created 1 full level and with that 50% of the game's content. I worked at all level design aspects from research, to sketching, to building, to iterating, etc.
Level Design Lead
It was my responsibility that the environment artists and level designers communicated properly and met deadlines.
Pre-Production
I was solely responsible for creating the level design pipelines and documentation to onboard new people joining our project.
Custom Engine
The engine was developed by programmers of our university in 6 months. We learned it in a few weeks and created the entire game with it.
Portal 2
A passion project for Portal 2, in which I created a community puzzle level, which ended up being featured on the front page of the Steam workshop.
Project Highlights:
Level Design
I used puzzle design and a variety of Portal's established mechanics, to create a challenging level for the Portal 2 community to master.
Passion Project
The project was created by myself in my own spare time, fueled by my passion for the intrigate puzzle mechanics that Portal provides.
Popularity
The level was extremely well received and was featured on the front-side of the Steam Workshop. The level has a 5/5 star rating with 1000+ votes.
Community Management
I managed a lot of comments and feedback that my level received. Partly from the core Portal 2 community and partly from puzzle game fans.
Unreal Tournament
A free-for all deathmatch "Unreal Tournament" community level, with the name "DM-Excavation", made in the Unreal Engine. Each room uses color-coding to ease navigation.
Project Highlights:
Level Design
Designing a playspace for a multiplayer first-person shooter. From booting the game up for the first time to tweaking the last whitebox block.
Room-Specific Design
Each room was made with a mechanic, sub-theme and color code in mind, to make it visually and mechanically appealing, while being easy to navigate.
Flow
Creating intuitive and balanced flow in the overall map and between the individual areas, with main routes, secondary routes and ninja-routes.
Rapid Iteration
The project brief's scope was set for 8 weeks, but I strived to complete the project in 5 weeks instead, without quality loss. I achieved this goal.
Cosmic Crunch
An on-rails shooter where you play a shark flying through space. It was designed for a self-made controller where you steer by turning your head and open your mouth to eat things.
Project Highlights:
Level Design
I did the entire level design for the game alone. From placing the spline, to placing obstacle, to discussing art assets with the environment artists.
Technical Design
I used Unreal's visual scripting system to create all obstacle functionality in the game by myself, in addition to the player character's "eating" mechanic
Game Design
At the beginning of the project I worked together with my team to create and balance the core game system and how the parts would work together.
Custom Controller
The game was created to work with a self-made controller. It was a helmet where you tilt your head to move and open your mouth to eat in-game.
Slime Survivor
A Samsung Gear VR wave-based arena shooter where you use physics to bash enemies or objects against each other to defeat an endless horde of slimes. Fully playable on phone!
Project Highlights:
Level Design
I created the entire playspace as the team's only level designer. Collisions were challenging, since the enemies moved entirely based on physics.
Technical Design
I used Unreal's visual scripting system to implement the wave system, the enemy spawning system and the combo system into the game.
Game Design
I spent the beginning of the project brainstorming, inventing and balancing the core gameplay loop and refining the mechanics, with the design team.
VR-Development
The game was entirely developed for the Samsung Gear VR headset, with a Samsung Galaxy S III phone inside. No extra controller to play needed!