Roald | Level Designer

Hey,

I think that the design of your site is very clean and easy to navigate. It took me a while to notice the menu button in the corner though.

All of the pieces look great but I think they might be lacking a bit of documentation. Most of the texts you have feel like summaries and to me it doesn't feel like they go into any depth about your designs. A gallery of pictures don't tell me much about your design choices so I think it would be great to get to know what your thought process was with some smaller descriptions here and there.

Moonshine looks awesome but the top down don't really tell me much about how you can progress the level. I think a video playthrough of the map could be a great help to showcase how the level is played.

I've noticed a few spelling errors so I think it could be a good idea to copy paste your texts in a google docs just to get some free spell checks.

I'm not familiar with CS:GO but it looks like Invade have some great Workshop numbers that I would feature somewhere and brag more about.

Overall I think the portfolio is great, it's just that I want more documentation on the pieces to get to know you better as a designer. If you'd like some inspiration I sometimes look at Plubo's portfolio because he does an awesome job documenting his work on his maps.

You do however have many pictures of really good looking and polished areas that I'm sure will impress a lot of peeps when they're looking over your application.

I hope you found something I said helpful.

I can help you out with the spelling if you do add more documentation. Just let me know on Steam.

@Roald to record, if you have an nVidia 9xx or newer, you can use the native nVidia Shadowplay. It’s great and doesn’t cause lagging. It bugged out on me in the past, losing the sound, but hasn’t happened in almost a year.

For the spelling I’d recommend Grammarly as it’s a bit more advanced than other spellcheckers. When I was creating the bulk of job applications the first time, I also signed up for the PRO version; they have a free trial I think (at least they used to) but signing up for one month and banging out tens of applications is a good way to do it.

Hey @Roald I really like your portfolio, it's simple and your projects are all in one place, and easy to go through!

One thing I would do is put the email address on the front page, so recruiters can quickly glance at your stuff and contact you. Apparently 98% of visitors spend under 30s on a portfolio website, so you need to get the point across real fast:

(Those are stats for mine but I can't imagine it's very different for others...)

Think about what you have time to do in like 25s... this means that they don't really read text, just skip through Youtube videos, etc. Recruiters quickly look at your stuff, send it to leads, see the email address, contact you and that's it.

The other pages (contact/about/log) won't really be used, you could almost remove them if you want to make your portfolio even simpler. Content is what matters, which is why I personally prefer to remove everything else. That stuff is usually redundant or not so useful anyways:

• Personal statement/description - Nobody reads that, unfortunately... and that's mostly what interviews are for anyways, to see what you're like as a person.
• Working experience - They can easily see that on your Linkedin or through the projects themselves (like if you have The Division in your projects they know you worked at Ubisoft...)
• The list of softwares you know - It doesn't mean much because they expect you to be able to pick up any software anyways.
• Contacts - Only your email address is needed, which you can put on your front page anyways.

Anyways good job it's looking solid!

I fixed some typos and grammatical errors on the Station page.

When Valve released the new Wingman game mode for CS:GO I immediately rolled up my sleeves to think of a fun "out of the box" map. After all, thinking about gameplay and how to make it fun and interesting is what I enjoy most about Level Design.

For Station I used a two layer layout for many reasons. Since it’s a 2 vs 2 game mode I aimed to create something simple but dynamic simultaneously. The bombsite had to be something intriguing, and what’s better than blowing up a pillar right below a train station?

My original concept was a map with two main routes that split into more paths, accessed when the attacking team succeeds to push and gain map control. The defending team has to decide which tactic they are going to play: more defensive or aggressive. I have thought a lot about timings, sight lines, combat points, rotations and map flow.

Untor Morozov is working with me and is responsible of the majority of the environment art. The final screenshots (after the overview) showcase my graybox version.

Also I would suggest making the title a steam link on top of the existing one, as well as adding an environmental artist field to the rest on the bottom. Furthermore, add some dead space beneath the text so the steam link doesn't immediately disappear when you scroll very slightly downwards. Otherwise it looks pretty clean. I can do more edits if you would like.

Ugh, I think the new one is a bit of a step back. The amount of clicks it takes to get to that specific blog post is not good.

No problem, but I didn't go through all the entries. Maybe someone else can also take a look

Looks neat dude!!

I like your overview showing where things are and where zombies come from! I also like your gameplay video at the bottom, but I think it should come in way sooner in the page. Videos are always better at communicating gameplay than screenshots, especially yours since you added voiceover!

If you take a step back and squint, all of your screenshots look identical... I'd probably replace some of them with different ones, like one of an interior, one looking downwards at an area, etc.

Also there's still a few typos, I highly recommend running all text through a spellchecker before publishing, even if it looks all good at a glance...

Cheers, Keep it up!

Damn didnt know you were Dutch too ?

Quote

Quote Hi there, my name is Roald and I have a strong thrive for creating things in any sense of the word. I love to draw, paint, photograph, write, design levels, develop ideas and think about solutions.

Hi there, my name is Roald and I have a strong desire to create things in any sense of the word. I love to draw, paint, photograph, write, create spaces, develop ideas and think about solutions.

Hope this helps