When I joined the team at Pixel Toys in 2014, Freeblade was in the early stages of a prototype. I was brought in as a junior game designer to build levels and content for the promising mobile title. 

Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade is an on-rails shooter where the player fights against Chaos and Ork factions in a revenge story on the players fallen house. 

Players can upgrade their weapons to become stronger and progress through the increasingly difficult campaign, challenges, and procedural content. Player can also customise their Freeblade with liveries, graphics, and colour palettes. 

As the level designer on the project I worked closely with programmers and artist; helping to shape the gameplay and level design tools within Unity3D; laying splines for the player and enemies, scripting player behaviour, enemy AI, cutscenes, and destructibles, as well as defining the playspaces and modular pieces that would make up the environment kits I would use to build levels. 

After plenty of experimenting and playtesting I started to get a feel for the gameplay early on in Freeblade, chopping the game up into beats using the core mechanics. I would often draw pacing curves on paper when building up the gameplay and maintaining a progression matrix to track how often I tested the player on particular mechanics and enemy archetypes. 

I found the trick to keeping the gameplay fresh was to build up the pace using light weapon and heavy weapon attacks, which would slowly deplete the players ammo resources, then before any sense of monotony built up I'd throw a melee unit at the player to break that tension with a glory kill. These melee fights acted as an organic respite period to give the player a slight breather and reset the pacing curve. 

Freeblade also featured semi-procedural levels which was an interesting challenge. I created modular sections of gameplay using the modular environment kit and tools but with the limitations in crossing from one modular piece of gameplay into the next. I solved this by marking safe areas of environment where I could bleed units out of the modular area into the next to make the gameplay seamless, as opposed to obvious downtime when transitioning between the stitched together gameplay pieces. 

I was set a goal when building levels for Freeblade: create as much content as you possibly can. 

Due to the predefined campaign length and story, I had to find other ways of expanding the games content. This is when challenges were added to the game. I was responsible for building the majority of the challenge-versions of the campaign missions. This meant taking the campaign mission which already existed, ripping out the story, filling in any missing beats where the narrative previously filled, and setting up objectives for the player to complete. These came in a few varieties, such as: Assassinate, Escort, Kill Count, and Time Attacks. 

Freeblade released with 8 out of 12 chapters in November 2015. At this time, I was given responsibility to fully manage the remaining 4 chapters, while reporting to my lead designer for final check-off. During this time code resource was limited for gameplay related tasks; so I took it upon myself to prototype and code some of the gameplay features such as the Ork Portals. I had to lead the creative decisions and push for support from other disciplines, otherwise they likely wouldn't have made it into the game.