Diablo IV | Lord of Hatred
Associate Dungeon Designer (2025-2026) Blizzard Entertainment
During this development cycle I contributed extensively in planning, designing, and laying the foundational island blockout for Diablo IV’s second expansion zone - The Skovos Isles.
After the bulk of this work was completed, I transitioned to the Dungeon Design team where I was responsible for designing and maintaining Procedural Tileset Dungeons and various pieces of associated content including Campaign Quests, Activity Content, and more.
Open World Level Design
The core executable work for this role was sculpting large areas of terrain and using a mix of procedural biome-painting and hand-placed block-out meshes to define the playable Navmesh.
Planning and map creation was the bulk of most supplementary work. Our team collaborated closely on the layout and placement of POIs, Dungeon Entrances, Quest Objectives, Zone/Subzone Boundaries, Server Transition Areas, and the Roads/Paths connecting them.
Our team’s core Design Pillar was to maintain an optimal playspace for the fast-paced monster-packed gameplay. In addition, allowing the player mount to maneuver around comfortably and smoothly.
Playspace metrics like pathing angles, inclines, widths, and preserving flat open areas for increased Monster Spawners and Activity/Quest content were the main focuses of iteration.
Tileset Dungeon Design
Diablo’s Dungeon spaces are created through a different pipeline than the static open world areas. These spaces are built by stitching together modular sets of self-contained playspaces in the form of tiles.
These tiles can be assembled through various procedural “seeds” in which the layouts will vary as players return to the same dungeon. On Diablo, we call this system the “DRLG” or “Dungeon Randomized Layout Generator” - a node based tool used to have high levels of control over how seeds may generate based on the vision of a particular dungeon experience. We also craft static bespoke layouts that are designed specifically for one time handcrafted content such as Campaign, Strongholds, or specific Activity content.
Transitioning to the Dungeon Design team has provided many new opportunities and insights into creating content for Diablo IV. Particularly having to maintain player’s experience and expectations in a rapidly changing systems environment. Concepts like content pacing, content length, dead-ends / looping-paths, objective types, monster encounters and general accessibility and “flow” optimization were the core focuses of iteration.
This role has been incredibly valuable to my career skillset growth, as I now work and collaborate across multiple different design components. (Level Design, Quest Design, Activity Design, Encounters, User Interface). Tinkering and building different gameplay prototypes using LUA has been especially fun and exciting.