Weekly Blog 45

Welcome to our new blog series where we share short interviews with the people creating Lost Legions. Each post gives someone from the team a chance to talk about what they’re working on, what they enjoy, and what challenges they face. We hope this format gives you a fresh and personal look at how the game grows.

Introduce yourself: Hi, I’m Ruben. I’m a Junior Level Designer at Tarock Interactive, and I’ve been working on Lost Legions for the last 6 months. I started as an intern in summer and apparently made a name for myself, because I was offered a junior position shortly after. In my time here I learned a lot about building an open world. What I enjoy most is giving players a good experience when they explore the game. My main job is to plan and structure the world, especially the points of interest like enemy camps or places where players can find loot.

What are you working on right now, and why are you excited about it? Right now, I’m working on the first big biome, the Meadows. Inside this biome, we have different sub-areas, and at the moment I’m building a bigger Germanic camp. It’s a lot of fun to plan this camp so that it works well for gameplay and player guidance. I’m also very excited to see how it will hold up during the upcoming playtests and what players will do in this place. I’m really looking forward to that.

What challenges do you have at the moment, and how do you solve them? This Germanic camp is special because it is part of a stealth mission. So the layout needs to be different from the normal camps in the world. For this, I had to do some research again, because I’m still learning a lot as a junior. I looked into how stealth gameplay works, what players need, and how cover is usually placed. Now I try to use that knowledge. For example I place tents so players can use them as hiding spots or sneak around. In other camps, open combat is normal, but here stealth also needs to feel good.

How does your workflow look from the start of a task until it is done in the game? When I get a task like “design this biome and polish it,” I split it into smaller steps. First, I plan the area on a 2D map. I decide what we need in this biome, where points of interest should be, and how everything connects. I think about how players move through the area and what they can discover. After the 2D planning, I start reworking the landscape in the engine. I shape the terrain and paint it, deciding where forest, meadow, or other materials go. Then I move into the blockout stage, which is the process of planning directly in the engine with basic shapes like cubes. With player guidance in mind I place torches, fences and other small elements that help the player to understand their surroundings and what they can do. After that I clean everything up and add some comments before I hand it all over to the environment artists for set dressing. Which is the process of detailing the environment with items. After that comes the polishing and optimizing stage. Based on final observations and feedback I tweak the object placements, fix small things, and make sure the area has the quality we want. It’s a step by step routine, from rough to fine.