Lukas Joley | Level Designer

Tom Clancy's The Division

Trailer | Massive Entertainment - A Ubisoft Studio | Released March 8 2016

I joined the Open World Level Design team at Ubisoft Massive in early 2015, to work on Tom Clancy's The Division.

Primarily, I worked on designing combat layouts and mission design in the Tenderloin and Pennsylvania Plaza zones. I also contributed to mission scripting for Encounters and Side Missions. During the post-launch support, I worked on the Search and Destroy and High Value Target game elements, and then on the map and features of the Survival game mode.

Responsibilies & Contributions

  • Ownership of the Tenderloin zone and co-ownership of the Pennsylvania Plaza zone
    My main area of responsibility on the project was the ownership of two of the early zones of the game. I designed most combat spaces and exploration areas in Tenderloin, and roughly half of the combat spaces in Pennsylvania Plaza. In collaboration with other Level Designers and Environment Artists, I developed these areas from paper design to whiteboxing, and to fully realized gameplay areas.
  • Encounter template scripting
    Assisted the Technical Level Design team with creating mission templates, using the visual scripting editor in Snowdrop. These templates were used by the entire Open World Level Design team to quickly and reliably create Encounters in the Open World. On a technical level this included creation, maintenance and bug fixing, and on a creative level it included mission design of certain Encounters.
  • Search and Destroy missions
    For the first content update for the game, titled Conflict, I implemented several Intel Targets for the Search and Destroy missions introduced in this activity, in several zones across the map.
  • Design and balancing on Expansion II: Survival
    For the Survival expansion, enemy placement and loot placement across the entire game map was remixed. My responsibilities included new enemy placement and loot distribution in the Hell's Kitchen and Times Square zones, as well as for the northern half of the Dark Zone.
    Further responsibilities for Survival included setting up and maintaining documentation on the loot density across the entire map, and during the final stages of development I was responsible for balancing encounter difficulty.
  • Post launch support on Expansion II: Survival
    After the release of Survival, I used live player data to find areas and routes that were out of line with the average difficulty of the mode, where the success ratio or rate of gear progression was significantly out of line from than average. Using this data I made adjustments to these areas, in order to reach a more balanced overall challenge of the mode.