I'm officially a "professional" game designer!

Okay okay, maybe that title is a bit of an overstatement, but I have very exciting news!

Among my many hobbies; one I've been doing since the beginning of the pandemic is level design, specifically for the game: Team Fortress 2.

I'm excited to share that today Valve purchased a level that I worked on (with a team of 8 others)!

Here is the Steam Workshop link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2237224308

Farmageddon

The concept of the map is that a farmer, in wanting to make the biggest pumpkin he could, gave his pumpkin radioactive sludge to make it as big as possible. It's possible that he was eaten by his creation...

Your job is to collect enough weed killer to kill this abomination!

My contributions

I mostly worked on some of the models, animations, particle effects and bug fixes. Below is just a small showcase of those items.

Weed Killer Pickups

These 2 models are the pickups you get when you kill a player:

Here is a video timelapse of the modeling and texturing process:

Pumpkin monster breathing animations

Another thing I did was the pumpkin idle animations to make it feel more "alive". Before it just kinda sat there completely still, it didn't feel like it was really a monster.

Basically I gave the big areas some up and down movement, and added bones to each tumor to make them appear to be pulsing.

This was surprisingly difficult because Source engine requires the use of "bones" and each bone can rigidly deform a set of vertices near by it. Making a "rig" for basically a sphere is a bit unconventional. It works though! 

Pumpkin monster death effects

This is the full "death" effect I did for the pumpkin monster (named "Gourdon")

This effect was created using a physics simulation inside of Blender along side a technique called "cell fracture" where you randomly split the model into smaller "cells". 

Big shoutout to a Blender plugin called SourceOps for making it easy to import level geometry into Blender!