jimistine

sound & narrative design

Hello there!
I’m Jimi, a sound and narrative designer, I most recently worked on Apex Legends, and Respawn’s cancelled Star Wars FPS before that.

More games at
ramshackle.itch.io

LEVEL DESIGN

Apex Legends

While I worked as a sound designer on Apex Legends, I nevertheless had the opportunity to use proprietary level editing tools to iterate on and optimize pre-existing maps. I met with leads from design, animation, and narrative while crafting a new, as yet unreleased map replete with props, point and spline emitters, reverb and ambience volumes and more.

ReSource Engine

Brinkmanship

My graduate thesis game, Brinkmanship, was published on Steam last year. Developed with Unity and Yarn Spinner, I did the majority of the C# scripting and all of the level design.

By taking advantage of negative space I was able to create the feeling of a gigantic colony ship with very limited resources. Players begin in what we call the void space, which features only the points of interest, and nothing in between. In the gallery below you can see how that strategy was deployed, and how it ties into the game’s themes as we transition to the game’s more built-out finale.

Unity

The player’s main source of information and where the game begins. While we initially wanted no sense of space at all, a horizon line proved critical to prevent players from getting disoriented.

A top-down view of what we call the void space, an abstract representation of a colony ship. All the player sees are the doors of those they speak with.

While we built little with geometry, what we did include had to be well crafted, lit, and contextualized as the player has little else to hold on to.

Transitioning scenes was complicated, but by leaning into the logic of spaceships, we were able to use an airlock (the repeating arches in the middle of the image) as both a down beat before the big showdown and as a loading zone to seamlessly transition from one environment to the next.

A view of the airlock as it opens.

Once the player was in the airlock, we were able to update Unity scenes, post processing settings, music and more. While our model of the ship didn’t actually include the bridge itself, it looked great from inside.

An internal view of the bridge, which stands in stark contrast to the dim, featureless expanse of the void. Here, the stakes of the game’s narrative become all the more real and tangible.

Radio Exurbia

Radio Exurbia is a surreal driving exploration game about the relationship between the suburbs and what lies beyond them. In addition to driving, the game’s core mechanic revolves around swapping between two versions of reality, one dominated by bright light and clean lines, and the other by organic shapes and colors. As half of our two-person team, I designed and developed each of the game’s three sections in both realities.

The first sectoin of the game is tight, giving players a concentrated and well-bound area in which to come to grips with the controls. Once they’ve navigated this more area and learned how the reality switching mechanic works, they get to go outside. In this second section, I took advantage of Unreal’s terrain tools to create a wide-linear outdoor space for players to explore, hiding audio collectibles in various nooks and crannies.

Unreal Engine

The indoor section of the game on the “prairie“ side. Objects in blue represent those that will appear once you swap realities.

The same part of the level in the “suburban” side of reality.

An optional obstacle course for player’s to explore.

An early whiteboard exploration of the outdoor portion of the game.

The first pass of the outdoor section using terrain and road splines to carve out the game’s critical path.

At alpha, we’ve updated the proportions of this section, added a terrain material, and carve out more niches and geological features.

After final art pass with props for both the prairie and suburban realities.

Headbonk

Headbonk is an infinite runner I co-developed with a pair of other designers over the span of about a month. In terms of level design the game is quite simple, but in that simplicity there’s a good bit of nuance.

My biggest contribution to the game was writing the scripts that allowed it to be infinite. The system loads pre-designed chunks of level, allowing us to easily create bespoke moments as prefabs and string them together on the fly
My favorite feature is one I added pretty late in the process. I wanted things to feel truly endless so I put together another system that allows the game to reset as you fall, landing you right back at the start of another run.
Play it in browser here!

Unity

Here and There

Here and There is a level I made in Unreal Engine 4. My goals were to learn how to use level streaming, landscape materials, and in general to create two unique spaces that elicit very different emotions.

Unreal Engine

The Farm

A recreation of one of my favorite places on earth. The Farm is also a meditation on longing and missing that which is just out of reach. As players approach a pond and the sounds of friends enjoying the water, the player-character is slowed to an agonizing crawl, unable to reach their goal. When they turn around to make they’re way back up, the cabin begins to disappear.

Unreal Engine

Hall of Available Samples

One of my first projects in Unreal from 2017, The Hall of Available Samples is a museum of free 3D assets. Showcasing the work of dozens of creators from all across the Internet, the hall is based on the Hall of African Mammals in New York's American Museum of Natural History, expect now there's a lot more pizza.

Unreal Engine