Star Citizen
01
The bar
Oh boy, where do I even begin? My journey at SC was quite an adventure. I started out in QA and eventually moved through several roles—game design, tech, and finally environment art and level design. Unlike my current studio, we didn’t rely much on blockouts back then. Our focus was mainly on building zones using already completed assets.
​
My first major solo project was designing the bar and making it fully functional. That included laying out the interior, setting up all the bar’s functionality and database systems, and creating the self-serve bar setup that’s now used across all the settlements.
​
The concept behind it was simple: these settlements are located far from civilization, so having a full-time bartender just didn’t make sense. It’s 900 years in the future—people can pour their own drinks by now.
02
The shop
As for the shops, while I didn’t handle every single one, I did set up several of them myself. It was a pretty involved process—each shop required manually laying out every item for sale, adding the functionality to make purchases, and populating the database for that location’s shopping kiosks. A very detailed process.
03
Cover
After working on the bars and shops, I transitioned into more level design work—specifically doing combat cover passes across all the settlements for that patch. I really enjoyed this phase, as it was the first time my own combat design ideas and thought process were implemented and published in the game. Hurray!
04
Personal LD unreleased settlement
Although I wasn’t able to stay long enough to see it through to completion, this was my first fully realized settlement—complete with a shop, bar, and guard presence. It was also the only settlement connected by a road to a smaller outpost I called the Water Treatment Plant. My plan was to build missions around traveling to the plant for maintenance runs or fending off small attack forces attempting to steal the precious metals being processed there.
05
More bar
Even though it might seem simple—or even a little silly—this actually took nearly as much time as the full settlement above. Every single bottle had to be placed by hand. Making a small space feel interesting, while setting up all the data for the different foods and drinks one settlement at a time, was a surprisingly time-consuming process.
06
Roads
As mentioned earlier, this was the only settlement connected by a road. I really liked the idea of linking larger settlements to smaller ones, hub and spoke, and this project was my first opportunity to explore that concept. I was approved to experiment with ways to create longer roads that matched the level of fidelity Star Citizen is known for. It turned out to be a great experience, as it allowed me to collaborate with multiple teams to figure out how we’d approach building roads across the planet’s surface.
