Industrial Annihilation

INDUSTRIAL ANNIHILATION ™

Factory building & RTS, Sci-fi, Action, Indie

Level Designer at Galactic Annihilation
(July 2023 - February 2025)

Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Team size: 16

Industrial Annihilation is a real-time strategy (RTS) game, and its genre can be described as a blend of sci-fi, action, and strategy. The game features a futuristic, industrial-themed setting, where players control robotic armies and engage in large-scale combat, often with a focus on destruction and tactics.

This page showcases the design, level design, and artwork that I contributed to and helped develop throughout the game.

Responsibilities:

Responsible for designing environmental elements to match the game's aesthetic, while considering how factors like elevation, obstacles, and line-of-sight impact gameplay
Communicating with the art director to develop and refine the game's art style, ensuring it complements gameplay functionality and aesthetic vision.
Collaborating with the art team, including environment artists, visual effects artists, and other team members, to ensure the block out evolves in a way that is both technically feasible and artistically cohesive.
Creating basic blockout maps to test and visualize core gameplay elements
Supporting the art team by identifying and specifying the assets needed for world-building
Refining designs and visuals based on feedback and ongoing iterations
Responsible for landscape sculpting and painting, adding key features throughout the map, including foliage, lava, and acid pools, to enhance the environment.
Responsible for adjusting lighting to ensure units and environment textures are clearly visible while maintaining consistency with the overall mood and atmosphere.
Responsible for creating the environment and scenery for the game's announcement trailer, as well as dressing each camera shot to align with the creative vision.

Early stages of development:

Tasked with defining the game's art style and aesthetic.
Created basic blockout maps using simple shapes to visualize the layout and identify the assets that needed to be developed.
Applied this process to conceptualize both current and future biomes.

Blockout Art Map

Blockout Meshes

To effectively communicate the art direction for our game to the art team, I created reference boards for each of the planned Biomes. Since each Biome had a distinct style, there was significant back-and-forth to discuss preferences and adjustments.
These reference boards included a mix of images from other games, online concept art, and sketches from myself and other artists.

Desert Biome Reference

Volcanic Biome Reference

Design Choices Considered

Game Duration: How long will it take to complete the game? How long until the first base expansion? When does the first combat encounter occur?
Combat Movement: How do different teams navigate the map? How frequently do players compete for resources?
Combat Areas: What types of elevation changes do we want to include? How many entry points will players be exposed to during combat? Do we want to provide the player with more open space or create tighter combat zones?

Map Blockouts

Due to time constraints and limited team resources, the map development process was fast-paced with minimal testing, a much so iterative process
Rough map blockouts were created to still ensure alignment between gameplay and art objectives.
Once the blockouts were established and approved by the design team, I began the polish phase and started incorporating art into the map

Initial Prototype

Final Implementation

Lighting:

I adjusted and fine-tuned the lighting in our environments to align with the mood and theme of each biome. For example, the desert biome featured bright, neutral lighting, while the volcanic biome used warmer tones to complement the lava textures
Created a neutral lighting setup to evaluate unit and environment textures under consistent lighting conditions. This allowed me to easily adjust the lighting while ensuring textures displayed correctly across all maps."

1/2

Neutral lighting scene and exposure settings using "Middle Gray" (RGB127) as the reference point

Final Maps:

I have led the delivery of all levels released in the Early Access launch, overseeing everything from the initial blockout iteration process to the final art polish.