RESUME

MARK STEFFENSEN - LEVEL DESIGNER

marksteffensen91@gmail.com

Overview

Team player and leader tasked with understanding goals, solving problems and taking thoughtful steps in getting the best results. History includes seven years in the games industry, helping ship multiple AAA-level products. My passion is trying to find the fun with the player while growing as a person and designer.

Skills

Working:

  • UE5 engine and visual scripting

  • Unity development using C#

  • JIRA – dashboards and workflows

  • Game development cycle with AGILE

  • Plastic, Perforce & Git version control

  • Console, PC and VR development tools

Personal:

  • Leadership and mentorship qualities

  • Strong communication abilities

  • Acute attention to detail

  • Inclusive team-player

  • Interest in personal and professional growth

  • Passionate and driven

Experience

Level Designer – The Coalition (Gears of War: E-Day) - Vancouver, BC

August 2023 – Present

  • Work closely with other designers, artists and narrative designers to ideate and implement mission layouts and structure beats

  • Work with world partition, packed actors and level instances to create reusable content that can help alleviate production cost 

  • Use blueprint, as well as other in-house scripting tools to create level logic

  • Create and implement level sequences to better convey planned intent to other departments and start important conversations

  • Organize and engage in playtests to provide early and frequent feedback to help with the iteration process

Level Designer – Archiact (Journey To Foundation) - Vancouver, BC

Junior: June 2022 – February 2022 || Intermediate: February 2023 - July 2023

  • Owned multiple levels, including the first and last, tasked with carrying them from a greybox/whitebox phase up to a shippable quality

  • Collaborated closely between my pod, including a writers and narrative designers, balancing design needs with story and art needs

  • Balanced between creative design side of putting together beats and flows of levels to more technical aspects of level scripting, building blueprints and using interfaces

  • Worked within tight predetermined boundaries, balancing both production scope, as well as performance

  • Onboarded and trained/mentored new designers to help them fit into company culture/use best practices

QA Lead – Archiact (Doom 3 VR, Journey To Foundation) Vancouver, BC

July 2020 – June 2022

  • Worked directly with design to provide feedback and support for levels, features and anything else related

  • Balanced team between multiple projects while managing multiple timelines

  • Managed and produced builds for multiple projects using both Jenkins and Unreal 4

  • Wrote documentation and acted in a support role to help team members troubleshoot issues

QA Lead – The Coalition (Gears 5) Vancouver, BC

July 2018 – July 2020

  • Coordinated with production & developers to execute testing based on recent changes and concerns

  • Wrote and collated test cases and test packages used to better direct testing

  • Organized shifts and managed time to avoid burnout, while still hitting targets

  • Participated in triage meetings, as well as meetings to determine scope and headcount

  • Wrote and maintained documentation for tools and best practices

Software Test Engineer – The Coalition (Gears of War 4) Vancouver, BC

April 2016 – July 2018

  • Worked on Gears of War 4 from shortly before it’s 2016 E3 debut, through launch/post-launch. After help ship Gears of War 4 for the Xbox One X (November 2017), transitioned to Gears 5 and helped lead the Campaign QA team through ship

  • Attended mission team stand-ups where I shared updates and concerns with team members

  • Gathered targeted GPU/CPU performance data across the game to support development

First Cook - Seymour Golf and Country Club

October 2008 – April 2016 North Vancouver, BC

  • Started as a dishwasher and progressed through positions until reaching a senior position

  • Responsible for taking inventory of prepared food, preparing enough for the immediate future, as well as working through busy services on strict timelines

  • Balanced many tasks while keeping communication with the team before and after service.

References

References are available upon request