Nat Clayton, level designer

During my time at the University of Abertay, I was fortunate enough to get a summer / side job down the road at 4J Studios, a small Scottish company with the tremendous job of handling Minecraft’s console ports (PS4, XBO, Switch, Vita).

From 2015-2016 I was involved with multiple DLC releases, the majority of which involved creating worlds for themed “Mash-Up” packs which introduced new skins, a new texture pack, and an example world to show off the new theme. Coming on board at the end of Greek Mythology, I was involved in the production of:

• Halloween
• Chinese Mythology
• Nintendo Switch Edition / Super Mario Mash-Up

Though the job title read Level Artist, the role was really more akin to Level design. Work on Mash-Up worlds involved creating thematically interesting points of interest around an open world, making them pleasing to look at and dense to explore. A culture of collecting music disks had grown in the community around these releases, so creating fun puzzles for players to solve.

Alongside Mash-Up packs, my time at 4J also saw us develop and release Battle Mini Game: a 12-player deathmatch-slash-battle-royale that took place across themed arenas (with small and large variations based on lobby size). I was involved in the creation of:

• Lair
• Medusa
• Atlantis
• Invasion!
• Castle
• Siege
• Temple
• Shipyard *

Shipyard, in particular, was a map helmed by myself and my colleague Emma Rydstrom from start to finish: sketching out initial layouts, blocking out layouts in-game, playtesting with the rest of the Dundee team and iterating new layouts, mechanics, loot placement and sight lines.

Sadly, Battle Mini Game failed to make much of a splash in a community that had already congealed around its own competitive modes: and as Battle was exclusive to the Legacy Console Editions, they are (to my knowledge) no longer available to download. However, given Minecraft’s limited verb set for combat, I’m proud of the variety of PvP maps we were able to create.

All work at 4J was done within dev builds of Minecraft, largely using the same creative tools players would have access to but with a few dev tools for copy/pasting large objects and filling in hollow space.