In the game's story, players are part of the first wave of soldiers landing on this frozen planet.

Boreas was the first level used in our “Galactic Front,” a limited time event where players join Companies to complete community driven goals and earn rewards. Every hour, six different missions are available on Boreas with a range of objectives and difficulties. To support this, I created ten missions across three different game modes for this level. All of the missions needed to play well on easy, medium, and hard difficulties while accommodating all of our “Mutators”—changes to gameplay such as enemy ambushes, unique player abilities, enemy stat modifiers, and more.

After players complete the Galactic Front, Boreas will be added to the regular level rotation.

For me, the goal of game design is to evoke emotions in players. These emotions can incentivize player behaviours, or enhance their enjoyment of the game.

In levels, you generally evoke emotions through experiences—either the player does something, or something happens to them.

In linear levels, you can plot out these experiences on a timeline. However, in more open levels like Boreas, you need to accommodate players moving through the level in various ways.

Because of this, I treated each experience as a node connected to other nodes around it. From there, I planned missions that move players through these nodes. Once I had mapped out the level on paper, I quickly blocked it in and began testing and iterating.

When testing, I focused on 3 things:

• Does the experience deliver the correct emotion?

• Does the experience fit in this section of the level?

• Are there ways to strengthen that experience?

This approach allowed me to create a large number of missions quickly, as I wasn’t building each mission in isolation.

The biggest challenge we faced for this level was development time. Boreas had the shortest development cycle of all our 16-player levels, which meant we were on an extremely tight art budget. We also wanted to convey the feeling that players were touching down on a planet, not just a single level. This meant two of my primary goals were to create a sense of scale and a variety of spaces for players to explore.

To keep art scope low, I focused on creating varied environments using shape rather than distinct art assets. This allowed us to create icy plateaus, massive ice fissures, and narrow caves with very few pieces.

To convey the scale of the level, I utilized verticality by creating imposing structures that loom over the player. I didn’t want these areas to be strictly visual, so I ensured players could navigate many of them from top to bottom.