Aside from the guidance and supervision I provided to our Level Architecture team during map production, I was also an individual contributor on several mission and open world locations from intitial blockout to final phases. I've included images of some of these spots here, but acknowledge that they represent the results of close collaborations between multiple departments... including other Level Architects, Environment Artists, Level Designers, Lighting Artists, and VFX Artists.

For more art from Redfall, please be sure to visit Arkane Austin's ArtStation Page.

My Arkane Austin Story...

When I was hired at Arkane Austin to work on Redfall in the summer of 2018, I was one of two Level Architects who were assigned to a large open world area known as "District 3." We worked hand-in-hand with two Level Designers to lay out the region, develop points of interest, account for the narrative backdrop and the visual identity of the zone, and plan out the paths that players could choose as they navigated the story arc of the game.

When schedule realities led to District 3 being scoped nine months later, many of its features and story beats were split between Districts 1 and 2 to lend additional unique flavor and specific local identities to those areas, and I was assigned to work on District 1.

By this time, I had been promoted to Senior Level Architect, and one of my first initiatives was to work out the neighborhood themes, their hallmark visual identities, and the logical distribution of landmarks for the zone in a way that worked with the concurrently-developing mission chains and story threads. Up to this point, even though District 1 had some established overall guiding criteria, most of the focus had been on the downtown area and the adjacent neighborhoods that had been featured in the team's recently completed Vertical Slice milestone, while the rest of the zone remained largely undeveloped.

I prepared a proposal and recommended some layout changes to support a more holistic design for the zone that could also include some of the neighborhoods that had been developed for District 3, as well as some general recommendations on points of interest and other aspects of unique regional flavor to include, based on what I knew from my upbringing in that area.

I had been with Arkane for one year when my Lead was promoted to Art Director, and in 2019 I was asked to step into her previous role to become the Lead Level Architect for the team and to oversee map production across the game. I held this position for 5 more years - throughout the rest of Redfall's development, and until the studio was closed in May of 2024. In that time I was responsible for managing an internal team of 10 other Architects, and - for a period of time - 7 additional team members from Arkane's sister studios.

Through it all, the guiding design principles I aimed to instill in the team were believability, signature style, and clarity of vision. We strove to create locations that achieved a tangible "sense of place" for the player. Our goals were to design spaces with clear reads and deliberate affordances to allow smooth and natural player traversals, while also accounting for special powers and accomodating emergent gameplay through a high level of player agency. Success was measured by our ability to portray a version of New England that felt authentic and enabled seamless integration of gameplay mechanics, but which also allowed for exploration, discovery, and rich environmental storytelling... other crucially important hallmarks of Arkane games.

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