Alumnus Update: Lukas Van Daele has worked on Mirror's Edge Catalyst as a level designer at EA DICE in Sweden. It all started when Lukas created a Mirrors Edge mod (see below) during his summer holiday (DAE-ers never rest!) and that got spotted by the people at DICE. Lukas was invited to come to Sweden and that resulted in an internship where he first worked on Battlefield 3. We interviewed him on his latest work: Mirror's Edge Catalyst.

The last 5 years you worked on Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, what’s it been like to work in such a big production?

5 years is a really long time so you can expect there to be some bumps in the road, you need to have determination to meet the challenges head on and stick with it till the very end. After all the prototypes, tests and reworks that were necessary in our journey to reach quality I’ve got to say it was very rewarding to see it through from beginning to end. This was the first project I’ve worked on through a full dev cycle, rather than just helping out towards the end of production, and as a newcomer to the game dev industry that kind of insight was invaluable.

The number 1 challenge of working in a big production is communication and I don’t see that mentioned quite often enough. Game dev is a social job, especially as a designer since you need to communicate your designs across disciplines, over various different iterations. You need to be able to deal with all kinds of different team setups and personalities while you’re dealing with the stress of deadlines. Somehow you have to pull it off without rubbing anyone the wrong way. At the same time those interactions are what make this job fun, there’s so much to learn when there’s so much talent around!

What were you responsible for in this game? Which tools did you use, what does it take?

I was responsible for shaping 1 of the 4 open world districts in the game, Downtown, as well as most of the main- and side-missions that take part in it. Besides that, I also designed all 4 gridNodes (movement puzzle missions). Deliverables included the geometry and layout of the open world and mission buildings as well as all of the gameplay scripting and cinematic events. I used the latest version of EA’s Frostbite Engine, Photoshop and somewhat less interesting... Word. You’d be surprised how much documentation is necessary to keep everyone informed on the ever changing designs.

Can you tell us something about the pipeline?

After a detailed document explaining all of the events and how long they’re roughly expected to take (the beats of the level), we whitebox a level using a mix of Maya and our in-editor modelling tool “CSG”, similar to Unreal’s BSP. The designer scripts all of the events and combat scenarios with a visual scripting tool and then those are playtested.

The buildings in Mirror’s Edge Catalyst are built using part CSG for the rough shape and then we fill them in with 3D modules and bigger detail objects. Just the building shape alone without any gameplay or detail props ended up anywhere between 50-200 objects which took a hefty toll on performance so we requested a custom tool to be built by EA Guildford’s Frostbite Team to merge these objects into one mesh to get better real-time performance. At any time we could un-merge a building, edit it and re-merge it again which allowed us incredible flexibility. So perhaps surprisingly each single building in the game was uniquely hand-assembled rather than auto-generated or placed from a selection of premade buildings.

Instead of working in the single level (!) that was the city of Glass, the city was split up in zones and prefabs so you usually worked inside a building block prefab to iterate on gameplay.