CV

Albion Online

Description

Albion Online is a free-to-play medieval fantasy MMORPG by Sandbox Interactive.

Set in a medieval world, Albion Online is a medieval fantasy game based on the Arthurian legends, with militaristic strategy aspects to it. The game has been translated into 11 languages and has over 5 million registered users over three servers.

Albion Online’s gameplay centers itself around a classless system, in which the equipment a player chooses to wear defines their abilities and the way they can play. Players can go out and do activities in Albion’s world in order to gain Fame, which functions similarly to experience in other MMORPGs. Fame is used to level up skills, such as proficiency with a weapon. Achieving a certain proficiency will allow the player to use higher tier of the same weapon class.

Responsibilities and Achievements

As a Senior Level Designer on Albion Online, I worked across level design, world building, encounter and combat design, production workflows, gameplay analytics, and team development. My work ranged from creating large-scale open-world, dungeon, and raid content for both PvE and PvP gameplay to improving world-production processes, analytics pipelines, and internal development tools.
I worked closely with Creative Direction, Game Design, Art, Programming, QA and Production to ensure the successful delivery of  the world and level design content.

Level Design Ownership
  • Owned the design and implementation of 15+ open-world PvE/PvP gameplay spaces, 2 PvE dungeons including boss encounters for solo and groups of up to 5 players, and 2 large-scale PvE/PvP dungeons supporting combat for up to 10v10 players.
  • Initiated and led the world-building process for Albion Online’s approximately 400 km² open world, creating production workflows, planning systems, and content-distribution processes that enabled the team to build and deliver the world within 10 months.
    Key responsibilities included:

    • Creating and iterating on gameplay space blockouts.
    • Designing and scripting encounters.
    • Dressing the gameplay spaces while maintaining gameplay readability and encounter clarity.
    • Prototyping and balancing gameplay mechanics for boss encounters.
    • Driving gameplay iteration through internal playtests and feedback, including heatmap-driven analysis.
Game Combat Design Ownership
  • Initiated and drove the redesign and rebalance of an underperforming enemy faction in collaboration with Combat Design, introducing new abilities and tuning combat values to improve unit differentiation and gameplay clarity. Validated the changes through implementation in PvE and PvP dungeons, with the redesigned faction later adopted by other designers and Creative Direction.
Tools & Workflow Improvements
  • Initiated, designed, and implemented a heatmap analytics pipeline that enabled deeper analysis of player behavior, encounter performance, and world metrics, supporting data-driven design decisions.
  • Created a level design QA tool that significantly improved issue discovery within the new world-building pipeline and saved approximately 50 development hours per month.
  • Collaborated with Programming on level design features and tools, including a tile-based level editing tool, improving world-building workflow efficiency.
Team Building
  • Supported recruitment, onboarding, and mentoring of 3 junior level designers, helping them transition into independent content ownership roles.

Featured Work

Expedition | Stone Wars | Up to 5 Players

I’ve designed and built this group PvE expedition level from initial concept through final implementation as part of the team effort to provide players with safe, PvE content that they can do with friends or random people. This included level design, level art, encounter design, environmental storytelling and lighting setup. On top of that I’ve designed and scripted the boss abilities and encounters.

My goal for the level was to tell a story of the ongoing faction conflict for resources where players take a side in exchange for reward, reinforcing the slightly grim and competitive tone of the game. Apart from a brief introduction text before entering the mission, the narrative is communicated entirely through environmental storytelling rather than relying on dialogue or cutscenes.

The backstory is communicated through the starting area of the level. There’s a destroyed and flooded quarry once operated by a human faction. In pursuit of resources, humans expanded into the territory occupied by a peaceful Keeper tribe. In response, the Keepers destroyed the quarry, built watchtowers on the way to their camp, and prepared their best warriors to defend their home. And this is when players step in.

From a gameplay and visual perspective, I’ve built the expedition to create a sense of progression from the quarry towards the mountain summit and the final boss encounter. Several distinct areas introduce stronger enemies, new combat situations, and additional story bits.

  • Players start at the foot of the mountain close to the destroyed and flooded quarry remains
  • They then climb the mountain through the outskirts of the Keeper settlement, encountering only hunters and gatherers that introduce the faction. They are also the weakest enemies encountered in the expedition.
  • Further uphill defensive structures and stronger enemies – warriors – signal increasing resistance.
  • At the camp entrance, players face a gatekeeper mini-boss.
  • Right after the gate, players reach a vista overlooking the destroyed quarry, from which they can finally see what happened below.
  • Towards the end players fight through the final sections of the Keeper village and then sacred grounds defended by powerful druids. The expedition culminates with the final boss fight against camp’s Chieftain.

This structure allowed me to combine environmental storytelling, encounter variety and progression, as well as visual variety throughout the level.

Below you can see the video walkthrough of the expedition’s final version.

And below you can see the initial quick layout sketch combined with the visual reference board, followed by screenshots showing the development of several areas throughout production.

From Initial Idea to Final Level

Starting Area – The Journey Begins

Keeper Camp Outskirts

Deeper into the Keeper Territory

Keeper Camp – Village

Keeper Camp – Sacred Grounds

Keeper Camp – Chieftain’s Arena

Expedition | Lurking Underneath | Up to 5 Players

I owned the creation of this group PvE expedition level from initial idea through final implementation. This included level design, level art, encounter design, environmental storytelling and lighting setup. On top of that I’ve designed and scripted the ghoul mobs and 2 boss encounters. The goal from our Game Director was simply to create an expedition that matched the quality of the existing content, while giving me complete freedom in how I approached the design.

I started with the idea of the sewer system overrun by undead beneath one of Albion Online’s cities. To spice things up a little and to explain the undead presence I came with a story of a group of sewer workers who accidentally destroyed a sewer wall and discovered an old crypt behind it. The undead emerged through the breach, killed the workers and spread throughout the tunnels. And this is when players step in. The working title of the expedition was “Sewer Maintenance” – to support this story.

For this level, I decided to change the usual process and skip the traditional 2D layout phase.
The idea was simple: prototype a small gameplay area first. Then validate that it had the right scale, pacing, and can be built with the minimal set of art assets. And only after that expand it to the whole level, translating the initial idea and the story through environmental storytelling.

So, instead of planning the whole level on paper first, I started working directly in the editor. By that point I’d already built several expedition levels and was very confident that it would work. I selected just 6-7 sewer modules from our modular kit and built the starting location, including several iterations, just within a few hours. I placed encounters and played the space with the other designers while also measuring the time it takes to complete this segment. It proved to be working well and had the right scale for the group expedition. This space then served as proof of concept for the rest of the level’s development.

Once I had a proven gameplay space with the right scale and timing I’ve started to roughly sketching the rest of the level as paintovers on top of the screenshot of that space. Keeping in mind the timing, the two themes and, a story. Just in two iterations I’ve got what I needed to move forward.

After a quick review and a green light from the Game Director I’ve started building the rest of the level. Thanks to the modular kit and a clear direction the process was quite fast. The images below illustrate the development process up until the breach in the wall that leads into the crypt.

At one point I needed to use the “quick paintover sketch” method again to figure out and then build the final space of the level. You can see this process on the screenshots below.

Below you can see the the final expedition with encounters, environmental storytelling elements and a secret room, idea that came to me during the development and was ultimately included in the shipped version.

And here you can see the video walkthrough of the expedition on hardcore difficulty level.  The gameplay on the normal level may differ a bit.