In my 12 years at the Creative Assembly I contributed to design many times, primarily for battles.

There are a number of areas where Total War differs from other strategy games and normal design rules don’t apply. Where other games are designed around choke-points, in a Total War battle choke-points are bad. They deny the player the space to manoeuvre their army and execute a strategy.

There is also a nuance to the design of terrain that is unique to Total War. During a battle, when two individual soldiers fight, there is a combat advantage given based on height. This means every pixel you paint can affect the gameplay experience.

Here are some examples of my work.

Shogun 2

I contributed more than a dozen maps to ‘Shogun 2’, each one presenting different strategic choices and opportunities.

These maps were designed around the new ‘key building’ mechanic and were created for both multi-player and custom battle modes.

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Fall of the samurai

As a result of my contributions to ‘Shogun 2’ I was given responsibility for creating all of the maps for the ‘Fall of the Samurai’ DLC.

These maps presented a different design challenge as ‘FotS’ had both melee and line infantry based combat.

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Shogun 2 tools release

When the tools and workshop support were added for ‘Shogun 2’ I created new maps to support this release. These were intended to be a seed to encourage the growth of the workshop amongst the TW community.

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Rome 2

During development of ‘Rome 2’ I continued contributing maps. This time I created barbarian siege maps and a scripted historical battle.

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Full Map List (Under Construction)