ABOUT ME

Max Hägglund

Personal

I'm currently living in Sweden and studying at residential community college to get into college for level design in Sweden or elsewhere. I have spent more than eight years at a small indie studio where I was the only level: world, art and dungeon designer.

When I started playing video games as a kid, I always tried to find unintended ways to go through the map/level. This meant that I found a lot more things while playing than my friends and that my experience of the games was often different from theirs. I have always had an interest in level design even if I didn't realize it until I started working with it. So, when I'm working on levels or maps in general, I love to make hidden paths or hide things for the type of player that plays the way I play, or have references to some of my favorite games, movies or TV-shows in a puzzle.

Another big draw of level design is all the research that you do when making dungeons, for instance, if it has a historical element to it and you get to take in and learn about things you might not have otherwise and then get to incorporate it into your work and try to capture the feel of something old in new light. Something that surprised me about working as a level designer is the delayed gratification that you get nowadays where you can see players play your games on streams and see their reactions to something hidden, a reference, or the historical accuracy of something you researched and implemented that the player may have previous knowledge of. That to me is a big draw when it comes to the world or level design that I have been working on so far.

Professional

I have worked as lead level designer at Gellyberry Studios AB since its inception and I am one of the founders. We started on the project Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore long before we started the studio, and it has had many names since then. All my experience on Ethyrial has been in Unity with a lot of custom tools from our lead programmer.