ABOUT ME
Welcome to my portfolio site! :) My name is Lukas Van Daele Vest and for as long as I can remember I have been passionate about Design in games. I turned that drive into a professional career after attaining my bachelor's degree in Digital Arts & Entertainment. I have 10 years of work experience in the games industry and have shipped plenty of AAA titles during that time. Prior to that I have a background in modding. As a Senior Level Designer and Scripter I enjoy working with people across multiple disciplines and can collaborate and communicate well to bring any idea to life. Throughout my years I have amassed many skills and I am proficient in all design skills from paper design, prototyping and scripting. I enjoy working with visuals but I don’t shy away from a technical challenge and I like to develop a breadth of skills while focusing on level design. Colleagues have described me as a friendly and creative problem solver that is dependable and level-headed. I have a high standard of quality and will help the team in any way I can.
2020-current - Multi player
The Battlefield 2042 team was short on scripters, in particular in the UI department. I'm always up for a challenge and a way to broaden my skillset in any range of design and technical skills so I volunteered to help bridge that gap. In general you'll find that I always try to help out the team wherever I can and this is no different. Considering my passion for level design I try to stick close to my roots though and work with ingame HUD and game mode info as much as I can so I can test my work while playing the levels. While this journey has been very educative and helpful to the team my fingers are obviously aching to get back into creating levels. Stay tuned in the future for more news on that! :)
2017-2019 - SINGLE PLAYER
On Battlefield V I headed up the level design for the german single player campaign "The Last Tiger". I did the paper design for all three levels and once production ramped up I fleshed out the design of the first level and did all of the scripting. The geometry was reused for the second level, created by another level designer. The last level was created by an intern I was mentoring at that time. As the senior designer in the pod I had oversight to make the whole campaign feel consistent mechanically between all levels. The challenge of these levels was creating a power fantasy of being in the almighty Tiger I tank while still giving the player a challenge, supporting all of the narrative elements. This while working with the heavy performance limits imposed on us because of the destroyed city requiring a lot of fidelity since you could navigate it in the tank but also on foot. The (enemy) tank behavior was custom to this campaign so a lot of back and forth was needed with the AI team to get it working for our needs.
2016-2017 - MULTIPLAYER
On Star Wars Battlefront II I designed two multiplayer levels, Takodana and Death Star II. These were created primarily to support Galactic Assault, a team-oriented 20vs20 mode but I made sure to create different areas on the levels that can offer fun experiences for the smaller modes as well. What I liked in particular working on these two maps was that they were fundamentally different and required different approaches. Takodana is more organic, featuring a rocky forest with crevices and is supported by bigger man-made structures like the castle. We were able to work with Lucasfilm to concept our own structures to be able to create capture points out of them. Sightlines are tight and quite a bit of verticality can be had by climbing the rocks. Working on this level required good coordination between myself and the artists working on the environment. I altered the forest areas myself as well but a lot of work was in guiding the artists and communicating how to reach a good flow throughout the map. Death Star II on the other hand is a hard surface environment and allowed me even more control in layouting, cover placement and the overall structure of the level. I blocked out all of the areas together with an artist and worked with concept artists to reimagine scenes that players would expect from the Star Wars universe as well as create exciting new areas.
2016 - SINGLE PLAYER
My involvement with Battlefield 1 was pretty short right at the end of its development cycle but I was still able to squeeze a lot out of that critical period. The team needed help to lift one of its single player levels to a more overall polished gameplay experience and that is where I came in. The level was reusing the environment from a multiplayer map and not a lot of art changes were in budget but I identified lots of opportunities in the gameplay department that I wanted to exploit. The level was quite open ended and featured three objectives that you could accomplish in whatever order you wanted, spread over three different camps. I focused on distinguishing these three different camps in terms of its combat encounters so they all played differently and the chosen enemy types could better utilize the unique environment they were in while still maintaining consistency between them. An enemy patrol jeep also roamed the level and visited each camp to glue the experience together so each camp didn’t feel isolated. There was also some low hanging fruit in the narrative department to tweak the enemy pathing, conversations and unique animations they could perform to bring the areas more alive. Through balancing the scope and making the right choices we were able to give the level the polish it deserved.
2011-2016 - SINGLE PLAYER (LINEAR & OPEN WORLD)
I worked on Mirror’s Edge Catalyst for close to 5 years, from its very inception all the way to shipping the game. Being able to work with a small team and being given a lot of influence and responsibility has been a great experience for me to hone various design skills like systemic open world design, combat encounters and the core moveset. However, most of my time was spent on my main passion, level design, which was split between linear mission design, the open world as well as various types of challenges. During its early phase there were only a handful of members on the team and work involved paper design, prototyping of set pieces, laying out the groundwork of the story and reimagining how traversal of the first game would fit a more open ended level design in the city. A lot of work was put into creating this world, making sure that the environment is varied and always has another nook and cranny to discover while traversing back and forth. For this project I was also hands-on with the art side of the levels. I created blockouts and influenced the overall architecture of the levels as well as propdressing the areas to work with the movement set. Work on this project has been invaluable in shaping me as a designer and my stamp of quality can be found in various parts of the city of Glass. I designed the first (open world) district of the game, two of the main missions. Some side-missions and finally all of the 4 "Grid Nodes" that in particular received a lot of praise by the players. These are movement challenges while you are infiltrating a building to its core that have you navigate abstract geometry and avoid lasers. Each one has a different flavor and increases in difficulty over time. These gave me free reign to focus on the gameplay side of level design first and create mechanically great areas.
2011 - COOP
I joined the Battlefield 3 team late in production and was tasked with finishing one level in particular and I was a floating resource to help out with the other levels. The levels themselves were mostly reusing assets of multiplayer levels and resources were scarce so it was all about finding creative solutions and getting as much as you can out of the existing geometry and the gameplay toolbox. As such my tasks were mostly scripting heavy getting the enemy encounters, NPC waypoints, UI, VO, etc in shape for shipping the game. Design work on the level I focused on was about finding opportunities to strenghten the cooperation between you and the other player that could join the mission. This was a "silent" sniper mission where your goal was to communicate and mark all of the enemy targets between the two of you and take them out in quick succession before they were able to sound the alarm.