Battlefield 6 - Season 4: Wake Island
Role: Level Designer
Studio: Ripple Effect Studios
Project Overview
I led day-to-day level design development for Wake Island under design leadership, translating the map's design vision into playable experiences. My work focused on adapting the classic map for Battlefield 6, implementing multiplayer modes, improving naval combat, and refining gameplay balance through playtesting.
Key Responsibilities
Led day-to-day level design development of Wake Island under the Level Design Director's guidance.
Translated high-level design goals and feedback into actionable level design work.
Owned the design and implementation of all game modes supported on the map.
Collaborated with design leadership and cross-disciplinary teams throughout development.
Iterated on the map and its game modes to support gameplay quality and project goals.
Featured in EA's Developer Map Guide
I was featured in EA's official Wake Island Developer Map Guide, discussing the map's design and development.
Paper Map Design — Reimagining Wake Island
Challenge: Modernize Wake Island's existing multiplayer layouts while preserving the map's identity, addressing negative player feedback from Battlefield V, and accommodating new Battlefield 6 game modes.
Solution: I designed and iterated on paper maps for Conquest, Breakthrough, Rush, Team Deathmatch, Domination, Escalation, Strikepoint, and Squad Deathmatch, refining objectives, playable areas, and gameplay flow.
Result: Established revised layouts that served as the foundation for game-mode implementation and playtesting.
Conquest: Making Naval Combat Meaningful
Challenge: Long sightlines across Wake Island's inlet exposed infantry and boats to distant attacks. Boats lacked strategic importance, while lengthy travel distances from the carrier and between objectives disrupted gameplay flow.
Solution: Introduced a central POI and additional cover to break sightlines and improve engagement distances. Refined objective placement and extended capture areas into the water, allowing boats to contest objectives. We also experimented with ziplines connecting the carrier to the island to reduce infantry travel times, but removed them following leadership feedback due to believability concerns and to encourage closer engagements.
Result: Improved infantry and naval survivability, balanced engagement distances, and gave boats a more meaningful role in objective-based gameplay.
Escalation — Balancing Combined-Arms Combat
Challenge: Integrate naval combat into Escalation while balancing infantry, land, air, and naval vehicles. To differentiate the layout from Conquest, I initially placed both team HQs on opposite ends of the island. However, playtest feedback revealed spawn-camping risks, while relocating HQs to the carriers introduced longer infantry travel times.
Solution: Relocated both HQs to their respective carrier locations from the conquest layout to address spawn-camping concerns and experimented with carrier-to-island ziplines to improve infantry traversal. I also adapted an existing Escalation vehicle configuration from another Battlefield 6 map, replacing applicable vehicle spawns with boats and refining vehicle distribution for Wake Island.
Result: Established a more balanced Escalation layout that addressed spawn-camping concerns and integrated naval combat into the mode's large-scale combined-arms gameplay.
Rush — Improving Infantry Combat Balance
Challenge: Our original vehicle- and naval-focused Rush layout produced unbalanced gameplay, with defenders sometimes reaching objectives after attackers. We also lost the core identity of rush which was an infantry-focused mode. Because wake island has so much water and because season 4 was naval focused, we wanted to try to push naval combat and traversal into rush.
Solution: We shifted toward an infantry-focused layout. I refined spawn placement and increased light transport availability to improve defender access to objectives.
Result: Improved defender mobility, gameplay balance, and combat flow through playtest-driven iteration.
Map-Wide Traversal & Cover
Challenge: Open terrain and long sightlines left infantry vulnerable to vehicles, while excessive vegetation reduced route readability. Infantry also experienced lengthy travel times.
Solution: I collaborated with World Art to refine cover, terrain, and vegetation while maintaining clear traversal routes. We also introduced strategically placed ziplines to shorten infantry travel times and the central shipwreck to improve cover and traversal.
Result: Improved infantry survivability, route readability, and traversal opportunities while maintaining balanced infantry and vehicle gameplay.
Breakthrough: Balancing Naval & Infantry Combat
Challenge: Early layouts suffered from excessive travel distances, limited naval movement, and objectives that were difficult to capture due to their spacing or having three objectives within a single sector. Playtesting also revealed attacker-defender balance issues, insufficient cover, and lengthy infantry travel from the carrier to the first sector.
Solution: Reduced the maximum number of objectives per sector to two, expanded playable water boundaries, and refined spawn placement, vehicle counts, attacker / defender tickets, and cover based on playtest feedback. We also experimented with carrier-to-island ziplines to reduce infantry travel times and improve attacker access to the first sector.
Result: Improved attacker-defender balance, streamlined objective progression, and created more opportunities for naval combat across sectors.
Small-Scale Game Modes — Improving Infantry Combat Balance
Challenge: Create balanced, infantry-focused layouts for Team Deathmatch, Domination, and Squad Deathmatch while addressing gameplay issues identified during playtesting.
Solution: I experimented with different playable-area layouts and refined infantry spawn placement using internal playtest feedback to improve combat flow and balance.
Result: Improved gameplay balance across all three modes through iterative layout and spawn adjustments.