Bend Studio: Unannounced Live-Service Project

Associate Level Designer, September 2022 — February 2025

• Drafted, implemented, and iterated upon 15+ discrete Points of Interest (POIs) for an in-development live-service open-world multiplayer title using a proprietary in-house engine.

• Established and wrote design guidelines for POI creation created by studying our vast-quantity of player telemetry data alongside studying insights from other open-world titles that improved our team’s work.

• Rapidly achieved fluency with a proprietary engine’s World Editor in 4 months and became a primary touchpoint for fellow designers, artists, and programmers to learn how to use the level design toolset.

• Pioneered best practices for how to best design terrain for any given POI using both traditional terrain-sculpting workflows alongside a newly developed terrain-mesh-displacement workflow paradigm.

• Designed and iterated upon a playable vehicle-traversable road-network for a 1024m^2 play-area within 2 weeks while adhering to recently established best practices for road-network creation.

• Co-developed systems to facilitate multiplayer world-object interactivity alongside combat-gameplay interactivity using a proprietary Scripting System within a client-side authoritative engine framework.

• Consistently spoke out within the studio to honestly and constructively critique our team’s work while also highlighting our successes and was repeatedly commended by senior colleagues for my advocacy.

• Specific and explicit non-generalized details of work or technology at Bend Studio are subject to NDA.

Isthmus Studios: Project Nautilus

World Designer & Creative Director, August 2021 — May 2022

• Established Project Nautilus’ world-development pipeline between Autodesk Maya and Unity 3D to create a fully explorable underwater cave-system to facilitate engaging traversability mechanics.

• Led an agile incubation team of 7 to prototype an immersive first-person exploration game set in a single seamless world. Successfully pitched to faculty and was greenlit to expand to 25 developers.

• Demonstrated our team’s game live to an audience of 300+ people including two dozen AAA industry developers and successfully released on Steam in May 2022.

Consequences Map

Encounter Designer, Spring 2022

• Independently explored VR level design and encounter design with the lens of creating emergent difficulty facilitated fully by player-decisions and developed using Half-Life: Alyx’s Source 2 tools.

• Iteratively developed the combat sequence, level, and lighting using insights gathered from in-person demonstrations, open online playtesting, and feedback from a design mentor at Santa Monica Studio.

• Learned incredibly important lessons in developing gameplay encounters that were vital to my interview process and design-test which successfully led to me entering the AAA game industry 4 months later.