Hi, I am Philippe Cwik, a 34 years old guy that is in love with real-time strategy level design since childhood.
I started making competitive maps back in 2007 for the Starcraft 1 community. Between 2010 and 2020, I created a total of 9 Starcraft 2 maps that have been used in the official ladder map pool.
In the past years, I progressively transitionned into creating PvE games and missions that are played solo or in co-op. I released my first game, Tainted Radiance, a rogue-like real-time strategy game which took 2 years to create.
More recently, I work on Immortal: Gates of Pyre as the lead PvE system and mission designer in full remote. My main responsabilities are to create the metaprogression systems and design, build and script the missions.
Immortal: Gates of Pyre
2021 – 2025
In 2021, I joined Sunspear Games to work on Immortal: Gates of Pyre as the Lead PvE system and mission designer. I designed the systems of the Missions game mode and the missions from scratch.
It is a full remote position and I am totally comfortable with that. This is how I worked on my previous game Tainted Radiance and also how I was collaborating with other Starcraft 2 map makers.
My responsabilities are the following:
- Setup the vision for the Missions game mode
- Create metaprogression systems that support long-term player progression in a live-service game context.
- Setup the difficulty parameters used in missions.
- Find the global structure of missions so they support the metaprogression
- Create highly replayable missions with diverse objectives that reward different playstyles and strategies.
- Playtest missions every week, gather feedback, filter the relevant feedback and update them for the next playtest.
This position allowed me to learn in great details how to program with Blueprint in a server-client environment. It took me a long time to become comfortable with how to properly execute code on the server or the client but in the end, I prevailed.
I love how Blueprint allow for super fast iteration speed. It will be hard for me to come back to regular programming. Sure, Blueprint are not as performance optimized as C++ programming but i will definetly keep using it for future personal projects.
Starcraft 2
2010 – 2020
Starcraft 2 is the game on which i honed most of my level design and environment art skills. The eSports side of games is a major point of interest because it gives me a great thrill to make high quality maps possible for high caliber tournaments and ranked ladder. During all those years i spent making Starcraft 2 maps, my tasks were the following:
- Whiteboxing the map layouts with balance and interesting features for the players
- Testing the maps with high level players
- Making gorgeous and easily readable environments
- Avoiding all the cliping of units into the environment
- QA for other team members during the ESV team days.
Here is a list of all my maps that have been used in the official ladder and high caliber tournaments :
- Purity and Industry
- Golden Wall
- Eternal Empire
- Zen
- Turbo Cruise ’84
- Cloud Kingdom
- Bone Temple
- Testbug
Tainted Radiance
2020 – 2021
Tainted Radiance is a Rogue-like Real-time Strategy (RTS) game i am currently creating since 2020 with Luna Charial which is the programmer of the team.
I wanted to create my own RTS game for a very long time and last year was a good time for my first attempt. Because of the very small size of the team, Tristan and I knew the scope of our game had to be limited.
We both enjoy RTS games and Rogue-likes but there are barely any games that mixes both. Because of the high natural replayability and the relatively low requirements of unique content for Rogue-like games, we thought creating such a game was feasible for us.
I focus on designing the systems of the game: The units, weapons, skills and upgrades. This is also my first direct experience with game balance where i spent many hours in spreadsheets.
My other major work was around the level design. So far, i created handcrafted multiplayer maps. This project brings a big change because the game is exclusively single-player and each level is generated procedurally.
Unity
2018 – 2020
During the past few years, i created multiple small games in Unity. I created my first game alone, Bound, before entering the Professional Bachelor’s Degree in Game Design near Paris. It is a rythm game in which i tried to do the level design in a rational way.
My other games were made in a team with developers and artists. In every project, i was focusing on the level design. I also spent a lot of time rationalizing the game systems.
Starbow
2015
Starbow was one of the most succesful melee mods in Starcraft II. I helped the team by making high quality maps for their ranked games map pools and tournaments.
Planetary Annihilation
2015
I was a pillar of this game’s map-making community. I bringed my experience of tournament maps from Starcraft 2 into Planetary Annihilation. This game’s editor was quite restricted in terms of level design and environment art but i still managed to make interesting maps. This game has spherical maps which are a total game changer in the way in designing RTS maps. These maps don’t have any corners so it gives players more freedom of action. The tournaments ran by the community used very often some of the maps i made.
Starcraft: Brood War
2007 – 2010
Starcraft: Brood War is the game where i started making multiplayer maps in 2007. Over the years, i improved enough to have two of my maps used in the biggest unofficial 1 versus 1 ladder server: iCCup.