In April of 2023, I joined Lost Boys Interactive, to work on an unannounced project. It was an FPS RPG, that would be cancelled 4 months later. While most of the work I did here was covered by NDAs (so I can’t speak about it in detail) I was put in charge of the HUB level, including all it’s quests, NPCs, and scripting.

After that project was canceled, I was assigned to a small prototype team, as a lead level designer, in charge of building out a level for a specific IP pitch we were doing. I lead three level designers of varying experience levels, in working on the level map. We delivered a full map in 4 weeks, without art support. Primarily using kit bashing, Unreal Blueprints, and whatever spare parts we had lying around.

After we completed the pitch work, I was selected to move to a Work for Hire group. There I was one of several level designers building out tiles, that would be used to randomly generate dungeon maps for a third person shooter game. Once more I leveraged kitbashing and blueprint scripting to make interesting gameplay spaces with unique gameplay.

Next I was assigned to an internal project that was a tile based simulation game. Not only did I build levels for this game, but I was also put in charge of narrative and writing. Using blueprints, I created an NPC random generator to help populate this world we were building.

I’d like to note here – all of this was within my first year at the company. I had become “known” for being a fixer who could come in and get things into a shippable, if barebones, state. Due to the organization of the company, people moved between projects fairly regularly.

I was eventually assigned to yet another project, this time as a Narrative Designer, with heavy scripting implementation. My work here was mostly focused on the branching narrative paths and getting them working in game. This included gameplay mechanics, branching dialogue, and cinematics. Despite our team doing excellent work, it was cancelled by Netease in 2024.

All of my work at Lost Boys was in Unreal 5.