God of War Ragnarök - Lake of Nine

I had the absolute pleasure of being the level lead working with a stellar team at Valkyrie to bring Fimbulwinter to the iconic Lake of Nine. Being one of the biggest areas in the game, we had quite a few environment artists on the crew including Willow Paquette, Maria Raducanu, Burr Johnson, Mitchell Stankowicz, and Mark Ehlen with occasional help from Matthieu Mouthon, Nick VIgna, and Sady Fofana. Also crucial to the team was Han Hunter and his snow generation tool which was absolutely essential to the look of this area. This was done in several passes over the course of the project as the snow tool became more refined.

We worked hand in hand with designers Brendon Fitzgerald and Farid El-Nemr from blockout to optimization bringing their game design to life. There was an incredible amount of collaboration in which we generally would each work on one phase of an area like blocking in or bringing an area to first pass, and then we might hop onto a different part of the level for various other stages like polish, snow generation, or optimization. I think this helped make the end result look like it was cohesive and built with one vision, despite the fact that we did most of the work remotely, and in some cases, never even met some of the people we worked with on a daily basis!

Last but certainly not least, I would also like to thank John Palamarchuk, Aenok Oh, and Brielle Porter at Santa Monica Studio for their straightforward direction and guidance on our work at Valkyrie!