Joshua Ellis

Hi, I’m Josh, a level designer at Gunzilla Games specializing in AAA open-world design within UE5.

For Off the Grid (a sci-fi battle royale), I’ve helped ship five locations and pre-produced four more for live service delivery to over a million players!

My life-long love for sandbox games fuels my creativity, and my background drives me to care deeply about metrics, production, and improving the working conditions and processes for others on my team.

Portfolio » · Qualifications ↓

Testimonials

Trinh Nguyen — Senior Level Designer for OTG:

Joshua is a fantastic level designer. I had the pleasure to mentor him at Gunzilla. Joshua is a quick learner and a bright person that is very pipeline orientated. His previous experience allows him to understand project constraints on a more advanced level.

Manuel Escorza — Mid Level Designer for OTG:

I worked with Joshua on several locations during our time at Gunzilla Games. Joshua is a very technically skilled individual that excels at modular workflows and creating pipelines to bring the level and art teams together. He is also a great co-worker and team player capable of adapting to changing requirements and situations inside the project.

Arkode Games

Arkode Games was co-founded in July 2019 by myself (Joshua Ellis) and Joshua Matthews during placement year.

While Matthews handled branding and game-art, I launched the Arkode Developer Hub (Discord) while working on our main project ‘IsoEngine’ — a medieval sandbox game featuring voxel terrain and level-editing tools.

After placement year, Matthews left to continue his studies, leaving me to carry the brand forward. Since then, I’ve completely revamped the IsoEngine and our social media pages — including this website — to better reflect my vision.

Developer Hub

The Arkode Developer Hub is a collaboration and mentoring community on Discord with members from all around the world! It was important for me to continue the mentoring I’d done during university, so I created a multi-disciplinary computer-science server. To date it has served 300+ members.

I have since taken a step back from running the server, which now falls to a talented mod team who continue its spirit to this day.

Qualifications

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Employment

Gunzilla Games — Junior Level Designer (Feb 2023 – Present) - Blockouts for open-world locations and landmarks - Art whiteboxes for modular kits - Administrator for kitbash and whitebox sets

Imagination Technologies — Documentation & Deployment Specialist (Jul 2021 – May 2022) - Wrote and edited articles, whitepapers and software documentation - Transformed internal processes, automating the docs-site build pipeline - Converted the entire content library to Markdown source and GitHub delivery

Sheffield Hallam — Student Mentor (Computer Science for Games) (Sep 2018 – May 2019 & Sep 2020 – May 2021) - Mentored and supported over 60 students - Hosted one-to-one sessions and group game-jam events

JD Sports — Customer Service Rep (Sep – Dec 2019) - Assisted customers with a range of queries and complaints - Liaised with delivery and dispatch companies to investigate order statuses

Pearson — Clerical Checker (May – Jun 2018 & Jun 2019) - Performed clerical checks and data processing for exam attendance and papers

Education