MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking
You are a cybernetic detective on the brink of madness. The only doctor who can save you is missing. Modify your brain to extract clues, bargain with ghosts from your past at the cost of sanity, and survive a decaying world of nightmares in this first-person horror RPG.
Role: Level Designer
Tenure: Ongoing
Team Size: 25
Platform: PC
Contributions
Responsible for White-boxing and Grey-boxing the game’s main playable space inside of Unity, dictating the layout of where and how 12 distinct areas are arranged
Crafting mindful levels with respect to key Level Design principles such as Landmarking, Breadcrumbing, Framing, Guide Lines, and Affordance, then pitching crafted designs to gameplay directors and project leads
Designed the Main Menu Level that introduces the game, capturing a dramatic chiaroscuro mood and environment
Extensive QA testing for polish before shipping, leveraging Notion to record, organize, and report details on each build iteration into digestible and actionable feedback
Coordinating development through Google Workspace and Taiga using Kanban methodologies, while working inside GitHub to organize production without merge conflict
Collaborating closely with 24 Developers across environmental artists, engineers, and narrative disciplines to craft an intimate, compelling world with expansive vistas
Attending Scrum Meetings with the creative director three times a week, with in-house Sprint Reviews each month
What is MINDFLUX?
MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking is an indie game that has been in development for a couple years. The game is a CRPG interwoven with psychological horror elements, elements that are designed to make a player question their own sanity.
You play as Ambrose, a cybernetic detective of race race of people called Cerebroids. Once renowned for your mind-augmenting abilities, you (the player as Ambrose) now suffer their collapse. You awaken at a strange altar with only your ID and a letter from a missing doctor who claims to hold your cure. Find him before madness consumes you.
That is to say, the core identity of the game relies heavily on immersion. Psychological horror aside, a cornerstone of role-playing games is crafting a believable setting where a player’s choices have direct consequences on the state of the world.
That’s where I come in.
Integration and Inspiration
Joining Lost Gate Studios was an aspirational opportunity. Coming from a background deeply rooted in the art of video games as a narrative medium, working on a story-driven title like MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking with a team dedicated to storytelling was inspirational. To get a chance to bring such a rich world to life was extremely tantalizing!
But after the onboarding process, a curious problem had already appeared. Unlike every other game I had worked on previously, MINDFLUX was a game already in the making. I was joining it past the stages of its inception. Navigating a Unity Hierarchy 2+ years in the making was already like sifting through tacks, but on top of that, the playable level of MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking had already been built. So where should I begin? What needed to be done?
As it turned out, everything.
Bringing a Dead World to Life
Given this premise for the world of MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking and the narrative crux the game’s experience lynchpins upon, the new level for the game required specific care and attention to the two criteria:
Immersion: As forementioned, crafting a story that compels a player is important, but so is the world. Making a level space that feels believable and breathing is essential to carry the weight, mystery, and interest of an audience into a tangible space
Navigation: Traversing the world is not intended to be a challenge for the player (this remains true just for the main level). The obstacles of MINDFLUX come from social interactions, decisions, and their consequences. As such, movement through the level should be intuitive, and pathways to frequented locales should be easily accessible—a player should not be annoyed when required to revisit a space
So, how do you create a space that is both confined in design, yet massive in scale? How can a level be made to feel overwhelming without actually overwhelming a player? Is it possible to make something feel intimate yet aloof to your presence simultaneously? I’m not certain myself!
But I gave it my best damned shot.
The Drawing Board
MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking takes place in the sunless depths of a quarry known as Trench Site Xi. Without going into too much detail over the story itself (partly because the lore is extensive, and partly because I wouldn’t want to spoil any surprises!), the science fiction landscape (cavernspace?) of Trench Site Xi is best described as the carcass of a whale:
Enormous and all-consuming, but dying.
Uncertainty is a factor of life down here. Whether or not equipment will fail. Whether or not the Axonic threat will re-emerge. Everything is a struggle. And though everything is pushed to breaking, then its pieces are pushed until they break, failure is never an option. Faced against the perils of the surface, extinction would be the only alternative.
Bring in the Worldbuilder
In July 2025, MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking had already published a Demo on Steam and secured 1,200+ wish-lists from Steam Next Fest. There was an established team of exceptional talent spanning writers, producers, designers, and artists on the project. But despite developers’ skills, it bears no surprise that within an indie studio—especially with a small team hovering around 20—that there are and were many cases where individuals needed to wear multiple hats. Designers may have to become engineers, for example.
But even with solid talent, some hats require special heads to wear them.
Lost Gate Studios, the indie studio responsible for creating MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking, wanted burgeoning developers with an specialization in Level Design. As aforementioned, the studio had many developers with strong niches, but the game itself was undergoing a dramatic transformation to bring it into sharper focus. As part of this transition, the game needed a formal set of eyes and hands dedicated to crafting the level itself and to bring the story of MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking into tangible space.
For this reason, I was hired as a Level Designer to help forge the world of MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking.
I was one of two Level Designers who joined the project. And immediately, we were set to work on the world.
Concept Art of Trench Site Xi, created by concept artist Andrew Lowry
The first gameplay trailer for MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking. Though the current game no longer reflects the approach showcased here, you can see parts of the level design that existed before dedicated Level Designers were brought on to the project (Gabby Gruvman and I)
“Just Make Everything”
You see, level designers were hired for this particular reason. There had been previous developers who worked on MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking that were no longer a part of the project. This included developers who had stepped up to the plate of designing the game’s demo level, but who did not understand level design techniques and methodologies. Sure, the level inside of the game’s demo was playable. But navigation was difficult, and the demo did not reflect the vast new systems and vistas that were expanding with the project’s scope.
To this end, the two new level designers were set to correct this. While Gabby (the other level designer hired by the studio) focused on micro aspects concerning the game’s new playable demo space, I was tasked with the macro—
Creating an entirely new level from the ground up.
In truth, I dramatize the task for the fun of theatrics. I was not left helpless to figure out where everything in the game was supposed to go—there was an immense amount of support from the creative director and other designers to set me on the right track. There was also a menagerie of concept art to help guide my craft and inspire my design work. The story of the game was already fleshed out too, meaning that important NPCs and locations were already decided, which in turn, provided a strong skeleton to build off of.
My task, therefore, was to figure out where and how all the puzzle pieces fit together. Where would they make the most sense? How would they be connected? Why would they be located in certain regions of the level? These were important questions to ask, not only for the narrative, but for the player experience.
Welcome to Trench Site Xi
MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking takes place in the sunless depths of a quarry known as Trench Site Xi. Without going into too much detail over the story itself (partly because the lore is extensive, and partly because I wouldn’t want to spoil any surprises!), the science fiction landscape (cavernspace?) of Trench Site Xi is best described as the carcass of a whale:
Enormous and all-consuming, but dying.
Uncertainty is a factor of life down here. Whether or not equipment will fail. Whether or not the Axonic threat will re-emerge. Everything is a struggle. And though everything is pushed to breaking, then its pieces are pushed until they break, failure is never an option. Faced against the perils of the surface, extinction would be the only alternative.