W. Mikael Romo
Level Designer
Shipped Titles
Immortals of Aveum (on console and PC) is an AAA first-person magic shooter made with Unreal Engine 5. I was a combat and mechanic-space designer who inherited and then owned the full pipeline from whitebox to full implementation, relying on my technical fluency and designer-facing systems to implement gameplay:
● Prototyped and iterated on multiple sections of levels focusing on traversal and combat
● Rewarded player exploration and problem-solving with puzzles and loot-box challenges
● Scripted quests, objectives, and triggered events to direct the player’s experience
● Collaborated with environment artists to bring levels to life and solve level/art bugs
● Coordinated with multidisciplinary departments to implement cinematics, VFX, and lighting
Curse of the Deadwood (on Steam) is a couch co-op twin-stick shooter made with Unity where you cut, blast, and smash your way through hordes of wooden zombies. I was a combat designer who solved combat-clarity problems by creating an enemy-encounter framework, relying on systems thinking and hands-on technical scripting to turn muddled fights into a readable, tunable design language across my assigned levels.
● Designed large top-down exterior combat encounters featuring large numbers of enemy hordes
● Scripted elimination, defense, and story-based combat objectives
● Macro set-dressed large outdoor environments to achieve aesthetic goals
● Coordinated with QA to ensure levels were bug-free and performant
Pet Collector
Pet Collector (on Roblox) is a PvP game where up to eight players in a match must protect their pet while hunting for other players’ pets. I was a PvP level designer who owned the full pipeline from blockout to final art and lighting, relying on metrics-driven prototyping and iterative playtesting to turn a hunt/hide mechanic into readable, mobile-friendly arenas:
● Conceptualized, prototyped, and tested numerous arena-style PVP layouts
● Elevated the mood of the levels through set-dressing and lighting passes
● Collaborated with game design and engineering to generate game features
● Coordinated with art department to scope and itemize level-art props
● Triaged level bugs with QA during and after level production
Flicker of Hope (on Steam) is a stealth-suspense game developed with an 18-person team using Unreal Engine 4.
● Designed stealth-based interior layouts within a medieval setting
● Applied principles of visual composition to lead the player throughout the map
● Set-dressed interior environments and performed atmospheric lighting passes
● Scripted moments of stealth and tension by leveraging AI patrols and cover-systems
● Created production-value moments by scripting custom triggered events and cinematics using Blueprints