Level Design
Emily Johnston
Anthem
BioWare | September 2017 - September 2018; September 2019 - December 2019
Project Brief
Anthem is a looter-shooter action title published by BioWare in 2019. I joined as an assistant level designer on an internship in 2017, working with the world design team to create an immersive open-world experience by managing all the overworld collectibles.
Upon completing my degree in 2019, I returned to BioWare and to Anthem as a full-time associate level designer. As the game had already shipped, I became part of the live-service team, working with them to provide an on-going experience for our players.
Anthem promotional material
Overworld
Collectibles
Anthem’s project structure split level design into mission design and world design. The world design team was responsible for building the physical spaces of the game, including exploration, combat, world event and mission spaces in the overworld. My role in this team was to manage all of our collectibles. This included all crafting nodes, discoverable chests, codex entries and viewpoints.
The crafting nodes were the most time intensive collectible I was responsible for. We had no system or toolset to manage them so each instance had to be manually placed and checked regularly to ensure changes to art or geo didn’t swallow the assets or leave them floating. I made the decision to place nodes in locations that made contextual sense such as plant nodes being placed in lush jungles or along river banks and mineral nodes being placed on cliffs or in front of caves.
Collectibles that encouraged exploration - such as the chests and viewpoints - required I have knowledge of Anthem's traversal mechanics and the overworld map. The game's flight mechanics discouraged traversal by ground unless there was a hook that brought the player in. When looking for prime locations for collectibles, I’d search for world events, landmarks or vistas that already had strong potential to draw players in.
A Strider Distress Beacon world event. Knowing where these events happened in game helped me decide where to place collectibles.
Decoration
System
Anthem's different enemy factions frequently used the same combat arenas. Mechanically, this worked fine but it created a sense of disconnection - creatures felt random and like they weren’t really part of the world. To address this, I was tasked with building a system that could spawn in props associated with the faction that currently occupied an arena.
The challenge with this task was simply getting the props to spawn in. The tech used on Anthem didn’t allow more than one piece of content to be dynamically spawned within a specified radius - this limitation prevented me from spawning in additional prefabs on top of the combat spawns.
Combats on Anthem were spawned through the use of an anchor tag system - designers would place anchors and assign them tags which were associated with different creatures (ie: ranged, melee, fodder, etc.) A separate configuration file would be created that dictated how many creatures would spawn in and of what type. The system would then spawn creatures from that config on to available anchors within the arena. I discovered this system could also be used to dynamically spawn prefabs - such as the props.
I made variant files of the props we wanted spawned, then created and applied new anchor tags to them based on the size of the prop. I added the new anchors to the existing combats, then I updated the config file to include the props. My system worked and was applied to arenas throughout the overworld.
A combat arena with Scar faction props dynamically spawned through the combat decoration system.
Live
Service
When I returned to BioWare in 2019, I worked with Anthem’s live service team to ship Icetide, Anthem’s final season of live service.
I became the level design owner for time trials - a new event specific to Icetide. These were aerial races where players could master their Javelin piloting. I collaborated with tech, art and other level designers to brainstorm the look and mechanics of the event. We quickly determined that to make the races challenging and fun, we needed to extend players’ flight times. Tech already existed to reset the player’s flight cool down (such as when they flew through waterfalls); however, some parts of Anthem’s overworld had no cool down areas. The solution I brainstormed with the team was cooling pods - items that restored some of the player's stamina. A custom hazard was also built for the races - Shaper nodes were large, electrified fields that caused the player to overheat and crash.
I laid out the courses. I focused my design on building the races around and through existing art, highlighting the beauty of Anthem and creating an exhilarating experience that had players skimming the sides of cliff faces, squeezing through narrow openings and seeing how far they could push their stamina before needing to detour to a cooling pod.
