Hammerwatch Anniversary Edition

My Contributions to Hammerwatch Anniversary Edition

During my time at Crackshell, the creators of the Hammerwatch franchise, I worked primarily on Hammerwatch Anniversary Edition, with later involvement in Hammerwatch 2. I initially joined the project as a level designer and spent the first weeks onboarding into Crackshell’s custom in-house engine, which is used for level creation, scripting, and gameplay logic across their titles.

Once I became comfortable with the engine’s level construction workflow and scripting systems, my main responsibility shifted to rebuilding and modernizing levels from Hammerwatch 1. Hammerwatch Anniversary Edition includes the full base game alongside most of its DLC content, requiring existing levels to be reworked to meet updated design, pacing, and quality standards.

Early in this process, my redesigned levels were often too large and overly complex, as I initially made only minor structural changes to the original layouts. This resulted in navigation issues and unclear player flow. Through iteration, playtesting, and close collaboration with experienced designers at Crackshell, I gained a deeper understanding of player exploration, readability, and spatial pacing in action-RPG level design. Applying these lessons, I ultimately rebuilt the affected levels almost entirely from scratch to improve clarity, engagement, and gameplay rhythm.

The areas I worked on most extensively were the three mine levels at the beginning of the Shaftlocke Tower scenario. In these levels, I was responsible for layout redesign, environmental structure, encounter flow, and enemy placement. Enemy placement was an important part of my work both during and after the mine level reworks, where I positioned enemies to support pacing, challenge curves, and combat readability across multiple areas of the game.

In addition to the mine levels, I also contributed to enemy placement, adjustments, and general improvements across many other levels throughout the game, ensuring encounters felt fair, engaging, and consistent with the intended difficulty progression.

Beyond level design, I participated heavily in internal playtesting together with the rest of the Anniversary Edition team. This included balancing heroes, weapons, and enemies, as well as iterating on puzzle design to ensure mechanics functioned clearly and consistently within the updated version of the game.

Due to no longer having access to the internal editor or level files, I am unable to provide in-editor screenshots. However, I have included as many in-game screenshots as possible to showcase the environments, enemy encounters, and puzzles I contributed to.

-Jamie

Check out Hammerwatch Anniversary Edition here! HwAE on Steam!