Set on an overgrown island with a magical living root, this island was the vertical slice level for Shadow Gambit. This was also the first level that was created with the new, open-world, design approaches in mind. The island has undergone some significant changes throughout it's iteration in order for us to get the gameplay feel right.
Balancing a location around freely approachable starting points, replayability and multiple missions was a new and exiting challenge in this project.

For mission pacing, we had to take many factors into consideration. For example: walking distance from each individual starting point, the difficulty of each possible enemy setup the player could encounter and possible overlaps with other mission on that island.
Enemy encounters now had to be approachable by any possible side. A key part in previous games' level design was that we always knew the direction the player was coming from and where they would go.

As a result, during production I had to let go of my sense of control when designing enemy encounters and had to embrace unpredicatbility and player freedom and lean into it.
The result are enemy encounters that are not as strikt, allow experimantation while keeping possible designed solutions and also allow room for experimenting and player freedom.