Unannounced Project

2 Year – Current AAA Game

Overview

Genre: Action RPG
Role: Gameplay Design – Combat & Encounters

Core Responsibilities

• Combat Design: Upheld core design visions via guidelines documentation, combat mechanics design and enemy encounter design & implementation across more than half of the game. Designed various signature content such as AI Boss encounters and their levels, delivering content end-to-end, guiding cross-discipline collaboration.

• Technical Design: Designed & implemented gameplay objects using Unreal Engines Blueprints for increased level and combat variety. Worked closely with engineering to improve tooling for combat & level designers.

• Mentorship: Responsible for onboarding and mentoring new combat designers, reviewing their work and reporting upwards to directors and lead designers to ensure the combat is achieving the creative pillars set by leadership.

• Supplemental Level Design: Performed additional level design, adjacent to my primary responsibilities, for late game combat heavy levels and all boss arena’s in the game to help unblock feature teams, paper designing, white boxing, implementing and iterating on levels in-engine based on stakeholder feedback.

Learnings

This experience has taught me how to take large scale missions from concept to completion, creating key content and boss fights while balancing ecosystems of items, weapons and enemies. I learned how to review work and mentor junior designers while reporting upwards to directors and leads. This experience has also highlighted the value of tool development for combat design and how to prioritise improvements over others based on the gain they can provide for designers.

Fallout 76: Burning Springs

5 Month AAA Game – Double Eleven & Bethesda

Overview

Genre: Multiplayer First-Person Shooter RPG
Role: Technical Design

Core Responsibilities

• Technical Design: Supported the Quest & Level Design team as a Technical Designer, writing and implementing various scripts using written scripting language: Papyrus, to improve their work flow and improve design implementation through tools development, fix bugs with developed content and tools, and for further feature development in a live service product.

• Feature Development: Designed and scripted gameplay mechanics relating to combat systems, implementing them within a cross-disciplinary team of artists and designers.

• Engine Onboarding: As Creation Kit is quite difficult to learn, I re-wrote all engine onboarding documentation to be updated fully and more concise. I became the go-to designer to onboard new employees into the engine as the project ramped up in staff, directly decreasing onboarding time.

Learnings

This experience taught me the importance of reducing technical debt and how the gradual accrual of which can lead to diminished productivity within the team. With targeted tool development, workflow efficiency can be dramatically improved in ways that doesn’t just increase productivity, but can make the team happy.

Blindfire

2 Year AA Game – Double Eleven

Overview

Genre: Multiplayer First-Person Arena Shooter
Role: Gameplay Designer & Technical Designer

Core Responsibilities

• R&D: I was heavily involved in the initial conceptualisation and prototyping of the project to get it off the ground and pitch-ready for internal greenlighting to secure more development resources. Throughout the project I was also responsible for leading structured company-wide playtests to drive data-informed iteration to refine system behaviour and overall gameplay quality, triaging findings with leadership and production into actionable outcomes for the team.

• Gameplay Design: Working as part of the core development team from the games concept to launch, I designed and implemented some key systems of the game: prototyping, iterating & polishing them using Unreal Engine 5 Blueprint Scripting. These systems are the Interactable Gameplay Object, Game Mode, Spectate Mode & Spectator Hacking Systems. Each system achieved core creative & gameplay pillars through iteration driven by rigorous playtesting.

• Technical Design: Prototyped & Implemented Multiplayer Gameplay Systems & Mechanics, tending to their technical upkeep throughout production. Performed technical investigations into features to help determine feasibility due to scope control. Acted as one of the go-to designers on the team for engine assistance, tool development and rapid prototyping, performing scripting tasks to support level & other gameplay designers’ workflows.

• Feature Ownership: I led the design efforts on multiple features in the game including Game Modes, In-Level Gameplay Objects, Spectate Mode & Hacking. Collaborating with cross-disciplinary teams to deliver features end-to-end, through prototyping, clear specifications and behaviour documentation that support scalable, maintainable feature development.

Learnings

This project taught me the importance of rapid iteration cycles informed by qualitative & quantitative feedback in larger scale projects when leading feature teams, and how to disseminate collected feedback into actionable tasks for myself and my feature teams. I learned how to balance my creative design with technical robustness and how to design and implement multiplayer gameplay systems in a scalable way that preserves technical integrity.

Project Scrapped

4 Month Indie Game – Hawthorne Games

Overview

Genre: 3D Isometric Puzzle-Adventure
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Roles: Leader, Game Designer

“Project Scrapped” is an isometric puzzle game designed for young audiences to help teach programming concepts by using visual scripting to re-code the world and fix it, solving various multi-solution puzzles to return the world to normal.

The game went on to win Creative Assembly’s “Best Student Game of 2022” award at the Tiga UK Games Education Awards. This was awarded for excellence in art, sound, and gameplay design. The project is continuing to be showcased at Abertay University for “Excellence in Design and Creative Collaboration“.

Core Responsibilities

• I spearheaded the development of the project as the Team Lead, coached and supported team mates and coordinated efforts for the realisation of a creative vision that I developed and maintained throughout production.

• Coordinated the development in a fully remote environment by acting as a scrum master, setting milestones, organizing weekly scrum meetings, producing production plans and helping unblock pipelines. Created a market justification for the product, prepared pitches and promotional material to show our mentors from Hyperluminal Games.

• Designed & Prototyped core puzzle mechanics centred around teaching programming principles and designed core loop a long with the onboarding experience and tutorial. Designed and implemented all puzzles and interactive world content culminating in an hour of gameplay.

Learnings

I gained invaluable experience leading a team and pitching to clients/mentors while developing a unique concept from scratch. I also learned the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration and sharpened my communication skills to communicate design needs & intent to team mates.

Mankind’s March

6 Month Indie Game – Hawthorne Games

Overview

Genre: 2D Isometric, Turn Based Tactics, Roguelike
Engine: Godot
Roles: Game Designer, Narrative Designer, Scripter

Mankind’s March is a turn based tactics sci-fi horror experience. You are tasked with the exploration of Quantum Planets and the extraction of remnants of humanity using your escape shuttle. The planets dynamic terrain allows your squad to shape the combat space around them each turn using abilities, resulting in unique and unpredictable scenarios every run.

The game was showcased at EGX London 2022 and won the Runner Up Award for Abertay’s DARE Academy competition.

Core Responsibilities

• Designing and implementing a narrative delivery system inspired by Narrative Legos and a storylet style of procedural narrative design to create interesting player driven stories.

• Designing, implementing and polishing complex systems like the Datapad (which runs through an integration with Ink that I needed to extend engine side).

• Designing, creating and balancing content in engine such as player and enemy units, abilities, mission objectives, narrative resources and character stats.

• Writing the story, world and all dialogue in the game, including 15 stories that dynamically change content based on gameplay decisions, character pre-conditions and resources.

• Directed a holistic redesign from the early 2D prototype into the final 3D version, sharpening the gameplay focus for a streamlined Demo showcased at EGX.

Learnings

I learned of the importance of early rapid prototyping to prove concepts and validate ideas early, and how to prioritise design decisions over others by focusing on solving potential pipeline blockages first during production. I further widened my pool of technical knowledge through using new tools like INK and engines such as Godot with C# to implement systems. I greatly improved my feature implementation skills through ownership over the entire Datapad feature from inception to completion

Space Knight

2 Month Solo Indie Game

Overview

Genre: 2D multi-directional shooter, physics based controls.
Engine: Unity
Duration: 2 Months

“Space Knight” is a Sci-fi 2D multi-directional shooter wherein players must explore the dangerous wilderness of outer space in search of alien cargo carriers to destroy, while they navigate a treacherous asteroid field challenged by physics based controls and trigger happy enemies.

I developed this project to challenge my scripting capabilities and push myself outside of my comfort zone to build something from scratch while learning something completely new, Data Driven Design and how it can be used to inform key design decisions.

Core Responsibilities

• Rapidly prototyped, implemented & iterated to develop an MVP from scratch in Unity with C#.

• Designed & Implemented various mechanics relating to 3C’s as well as movement, weapons, shooting, enemies, objectives and even a hand animated tutorial.

• Used Data Driven Design to collect and interpret quantitative & qualitative Data using a bespoke Google API tool and Unity analytics to inform all design decisions and drive iteration.

Learnings

I learned the value of the data driven design workflow and how to collect and interpret quantitative & qualitative data to drive iteration and better inform design and implementation decisions relating to systems & content design for a small scale game.