Game: Warhammer: Vermintide 2
Platforms: PC, XBOX ONE, Playstation 4, Xbox Series X/S
Tools Used: Stingray
Production Time (Personal): 5 months
Team Size: ~35
Role: Level Design, Level Scripter
BASE GAME
Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is a first person co-operative shooter/melee game where you traverse various heavily story-based levels and events, either solo or with friends.
THE CURSE OF DRACHENFELS
A re-imagining of the original series of levels and events, this DLC revisits areas familiar with dedicated fans of the series but changes things up to keep it fresh.
The original experience, in the first Vermintide game, had a total of two levels. For this project, we wanted to expand this to include a third one, right in-between the first and the second.
To accomplish this we looked at the current narrative and decided to split a portion of a level to be included in the new one. This also meant that we were able to expand upon the introduction to the narrative arc earlier and in a more interesting way.
I joined briefly after the work had started and helped out on the first two levels to start with, feedbacking on what we had, iterating on areas I could and trying to improve the whole player experience of these in general.
Eventually I moved over to what would be my main focus; the third level, the actual castle itself. For this I went through the whole level at its current state and evaluate it in comparison to the levels before it, both visually, gameplay, narrative etc.
My main focus was to improve the gameplay, both have interesting areas for combat but also have some events that players would find cool and interesting, things that felt like they would really fit in this type of environment.
Post-Mortem (The Curse of Drachenfels)
In the end we are very proud with what we managed to put out there for our players to explore. We hit the goals of taking the old experience and making something new out of it.
One of the main issues and pain points were having certain people in the same work space of levels with ideas that really didn’t would work in the way we were heading with all of the levels.
In future projects we would prefer to scale down and have more focus on who owns what and what decisions are made when.
