Agents of Mayhem was a big project for Deep Silver Volition, representing an attempt to make something different and built for a new sort of future for the company.

Early on, we all had to wear a lot of hats. Personally, I created the combat space metrics for level design, blocked out several iterations of what would become the open world city of Seoul, and pitched improvements to our level design work flow. I wanted to use this project to dip back into the world of core level design after serving as mission designer on our previous projects.

I created a number of open world combat spaces in the city, set up traversal routes throughout, and supported artists as we worked to rapidly expand it as the project changed close to ship. I was also the designer in charge of setting up the ‘doomsday weapons’—major events that would occur when the enemy struck back in force, with significant world geometry changes.

My favorite part of this project was that we used a non-destructive workflow to implement the city. Level designers could create spaces from simple splines and planes, apply temporary meshes and textures, and then update that same data with new content as it came down the pipeline. At no point was there a hand-off to an artist that destroyed our work in favor of polish—we could continue to iterate on our level design work right until we shipped.