Camelot Unchained -
City State Entertainment
I started working on Camelot Unchained as Co-Lead Designer alongside Mark Jacobs who I had worked for previously at Mythic Entertainment shortly following the game’s successful Kickstarter campaign. As the only other designer on the team to start out with along with Mark who was also the CEO, I worked on every part of the game and helped grow the team. While taking the game from an initial crowdfunding pitch and tech demo to a playable prototype, through public alpha testing and into beta testing, I also wrote design articles for a monthly newsletter and participated in live streamed presentations and Q&A sessions as we worked very closely with our community to develop the game.
Working on Camelot Unchained was both demanding and exciting for me. This was my first time starting a project from extremely early on. Since Camelot Unchained was built on a fully custom built game engine I got to design not only the game itself, but a lot of the tools and workflows that went into building the game. This was also my first leadership role where I was very involved in hiring, setting priorities, and managing other designers as the team scaled up.
Building a game engine along with a game is even more challenging than it sounds. Tools were one of the biggest challenges, as Camelot Unchained was optimized for performance with a large number of players, while also calling for vast open world zones. The level editor in particular was something that took a lot of resources. At the start of the project I was building levels using a third party heightmap tool which generated a simple mesh and single high resolution texture. This didn’t last long however, and as the game scaled up a custom level editor was built to take advantage of procedural generation and improve performance.
As with many game engines, terrain in Camelot Unchained was treated differently from typical mesh geometry. Multiple layered tiling textures could be used conditionally, and noise functions could be applied to break up repetition and create seamless environments. Working with this tool was definitely a learning experience, and there was a lot of iteration back and forth with programmers to get additional nodes for the node graph, and improve functionality for direct editing of the heightmap at different subdivision levels. The tools for every game are a little bit different, sometimes more than a little bit, and it is always an interesting experience for me adapting to new functionality and workflows.