Warframe: 1999 is an expansion for the long-running action game Warframe. 

My responsibilities included blocking out spaces, placing gameplay objectives for several game modes & key elements like enemy spawn points and mantle/cover points, handling navigation and collision, doing some initial artwork by utilizing the architectural kit provided by the art team, working alongside the level artists assigned to each of my level tiles throughout several art-passes all the way to completion and testing out the tiles in procedural layouts to find any glaring bugs or issues with my tiles specifically.

Joining Digital Extremes as a student co-op in May 2024, I was quickly brought up to speed on Digital Extremes' proprietary Evolution Engine, as well as the level design process of a game that uses procedurally generated tilesets. It was fascinating as a fan of the game to see how it all works behind the scenes.

  Through rapid iteration on a number of medium & smaller-sized levels, I learned a lot and grew as a level designer at a fast pace. 

Pictures of the 2 connector tiles from different angles

A Majority of my work on 1999's level design was focused on two connector-type tiles. Unlike connector tiles in previous tilesets in Warframe, these had to evoke the feeling of streets and alleyways of a city, so a majority of them were much larger in scale than connectors usually are in their existing context in-game. 

The two connector tiles I worked on were originally started by a different designer. During the early days of 1999's development, before I had joined the team, there was a lot of rapid prototyping of tiles to get a feel for their layout, and I took on these two connectors at a very early stage of the blockout so that the workload could be more spread out between different LDs, and it was still early enough in development that I was able to take these tiles and really make them my own. 

Each of these two tiles, while just being simple connectors, are still packed with secrets to find, a lot of verticality and spaces for combat, and, in some cases, important objectives depending on what game modes players are running, these are all things I had to account for and set up throughout the development process of these tiles.  

Throughout the development of 1999, I also worked closely with a level artist to design and set up 4 cap tiles, which are the tiles that we use to close off a route of the procedural tilesets during missions. 

These aren't very significant design-wise and are meant to be relatively simple since they repeat very often. Their secondary purpose is to supplement procedural levels with more enemy and loot spawns. I worked alongside a level artist to ensure that each of these felt interesting and compelling despite their small size while also making sure that they weren't too distinct or outstanding visually so that they wouldn't be too repetitive for players who came across them.

This was a really interesting and surprisingly insightful experience for me as both the level artist I worked with, and myself were both new hires at the time we worked on these, so it was really interesting to learn how to troubleshoot issues that both of us were experiencing for the first time.

Pictures of the 4 cap tiles 

I was fortunate enough to be assigned to work on a small portion of the main story quest that was released with the 1999 update! I worked alongside one other level designer to test out this tileset with an enemy type that wasn't made for it but was planned to be used for this portion of the story then, we went through the list of available tiles and picked which ones were suitable for the mission  

We had to run test layouts of gameplay to see how that enemy AI interacted with the environment that wasn't built for them, and then with that information, we chose a handful of tiles made previously for the "Angels of Zariman" update a few years ago to create a new layout specifically for this section of the mission. 

The layout of these tiles uses the same tech as the procedural layouts, but we set it up so that the tiles appear specifically in the order we wanted them to appear in. It was also my job to find a suitable placement for each of the "ghost encounters" in accordance with the pacing found in the quest script to ensure that there is enough spacing between each of them for dialogue to play out and for  players to feel the tension of the moment.

While this wasn't really a level design task, I was extremely fortunate to be paired up with one of the senior technical designers who was in charge of developing the new PvPvE game mode for 1999 called Faceoff, and I was responsible for placing and hooking up the objectives in each of the major tiles.

This task required a lot of playtesting to ensure the flow of each objective and placement made sense and provided a fulfilling gameplay experience. It required a lot of iteration and slight adjustments in order to ensure that each objective was placed in a location that was suitable to the gameplay required for it and also to ensure that things worked as intended with nothing clipping in other objects or soft-locking players. 

It was a really fascinating experience getting to learn about and contribute to the design of something as significant as a new game mode and to see how it changes and develops as time goes on.