Meet the Mech Masters: Level Designer Tyler Buser

I’m a, no make that The Level Designer, but only since the beginning of January 2013. I’m here to make some new awesome levels for HAWKEN, which frees the rest of the designers to focus on making HAWKEN that much grander!

As the level designer, I’m in charge of making sure the arenas that we do battle in make the game and its systems shine to their full potential. I tell my dad that I design levels and use their components the way a golf course architect might slope a green or add a bunker; we both make countless decisions about an environment or landscape to maximize the fun (or challenge). Of course, the rules of HAWKEN are much different than the rules of golf (and the pants are different, too). I end up touching a lot of areas of the game, levels are a kind of the nexus for 75% of the content in a game. I end up working very close with the engineers and the artists who turn my turds in to beautiful environments, but I also love collaborating with the other designers on game systems, too.

QuakeWorld Team Fortress (QWTF) + 12 year old me = addiction. I remember reading about QWTF in PC Gamer when it wasn't even complete. At the time the game only had five classes. It was the first mod that really meant something to me and I desperately wanted to make levels for it. Hilariously, I never released a Team Fortress map, because by the time I was any good Quake II had already been released! Tragically, there was no "Quake II Team Fortress", but by then I had discovered another amazing mod called Jailbreak. I created over a dozen levels for Jailbreak under the moniker “neotic”. I’ll never forget the first time I had a full 32 player server on one of the maps I had created! It was such a rush! It was the thing that really gave me the level designer love and I hope I’ll never be able to shake it! 14-year-old me got in trouble for bragging about the popularity of my maps so now I try to be a little more humble.

Wolfenstein 3D, my uncle gave me a copy that already had a lot of mods on it. The one that stands out the most is one where the Nazis were swapped with Barney the Dinosaur and the walls were covered in graffiti reading, “DIE BARNEY DIE”. Well, that’s not true at all.. my first was probably NES something, but I liked Wolf 3D more.

Team HAWKEN is glad to have Tyler around to make maps where we can give and take rockets to the face.