World Building specialist
Spatial Design and Technical Art for games, theater, film, and anywhere there's a world.
Mythic Merchants is a chaotic co-op party game about running a fantasy shop for a never-ending stream of adventurers. Players craft and sell equipment while navigating increasingly elaborate shops across five different eras of the world.
I served as Art Director and Level Designer, creating the game's visual identity and world from the ground up and translating that vision into playable environments.
Released March 2025 · GDC 2025 Best in Play - Honorable Mention
Release:
PC / Steam Deck 2025
Role:
Art Direction · Level Design · Environment Design
Building the World
I created the visual language of Mythic Merchants - from its characters, environments, props, and architecture to its broader world and lore.
My goal was to create a world that felt cohesive but playful: every object needed to feel like it belonged to the same strange fantasy universe while still being immediately readable during chaotic co-op gameplay.
I designed the characters and modular NPC outfits, developed the environment concepts, and modeled the modular environment pieces that became the foundation of the game's levels.
Below is the playable characters design progression through to their finalized models in the character select screen:
Designing for Play
The environments had to support the rhythm of the game: players moving quickly between crafting stations, gathering materials, delivering orders, and inevitably getting in each other's way.
I designed and modeled the level layouts, implemented the levels in-engine, and set dressed each environment. I also contributed to the progression mechanics that shaped how the shops evolved throughout the game.
The work counters themselves were a particularly important part of this process. Their designs evolved alongside the gameplay, with increasingly elaborate versions appearing as the player progressed.
Here is an example of the original sketches I created for the workshop counter progression followed by a few in-game finals modeled and textured by my colleague Zuzanna Szczudło:
Designing a False Perspective
Mythic Merchants uses a deliberately forced, false-isometric perspective. This created an unusual art-direction challenge: objects that look correct in a conventional 3D space don't necessarily look correct from the game's camera.
Characters, props, architecture, and gameplay elements all had to be designed around this specific perspective.
We developed our own visual metrics and proportions to make sure objects aligned correctly and maintained the intended relationships when viewed through the game's camera. This meant thinking about the world not just as a 3D space, but as a carefully constructed image.
This is the earliest concept sketch I created while we were iterating a testing out different camera perspectives:
Below is the first level we created for validation of camera perspective, modeling, and hand painted style:
And the final in-game level:
A World Built by a Tiny Team
Mythic Merchants was developed in just over a year by a team of fewer than six people, with only three of us carrying most of the production for much of development.
That meant the art direction was also deeply hands-on. I moved constantly between conceptual design, modeling, level design, implementation, and set dressing - taking an idea from a sketch through to its final place in the game.
My colleague Zuzanna brought the characters to life, modeling and animating them from my designs, and also created a large portion of the work counters. I modeled the remaining counters and environment pieces and brought the levels together in-engine.
Working at that scale meant that every new piece had to solve several problems at once: it had to fit the visual language, communicate its gameplay function, work with our unusual perspective, and ultimately make the world feel more complete.
The Finished World
One of my favorite parts of game development is taking an individual idea and figuring out how it fits into the larger visual puzzle.
Mythic Merchants gave me the opportunity to build that puzzle from the ground up. I'm particularly proud of how the visual identity came together across the characters, environments, props, and progression of the world - and how much of that identity survived the realities of a very small, very fast production.
Mythic Merchants was released in March 2025 and received an Honorable Mention for Best in Play at GDC 2025.
