Development Experience

Bend Studio: Unannounced Live-Service Project

Associate Level Designer, September 2022 — February 2025

• Planned and designed 16 Points of Interest (POIs) using a proprietary game engine. Earned consistent praise from team-leaders for my work developing our multiplayer open world.

• Defined design intent for the function of POIs to better advance player progression. Analyzed player-traversal telemetry-data to inform these guidelines. Maintained the design documentation for this work.

• Achieved great fluency with proprietary development tools within 4 months. Collaborated with colleagues across disciplines to share knowledge on the level design workflow. Became a valuable resource for my team.

• Cooperatively designed gameplay objects that facilitated emergent world-interactivity for our players. Reviewed and audited our work on a regular basis to ensure we fulfilled our players' desires.

• Prototyped and implemented roads within the open world that encouraged player traversal. Enabled engaging route-finding gameplay that contextualized the gameplay space for our players.

• Pioneered best practices on using a novel terrain-design pipeline for POI development. Taught fellow level designers how to use the tool and led discussions on how to improve our workflow.

• Communicated with empathy across the studio to collate critiques of our processes. Raised these concerns with the whole team to address these issues. Earned repeated commendation from senior colleagues for this advocacy.

Isthmus Studios: Project Nautilus

World Designer & Creative Director, August 2021 — May 2022

• Directed an Agile team of 7 in developing an immersive first-person exploration prototype. Pitched the project to an internal-review-board resulting in being green-lit. Expanded the development team to 25 individual contributors. 

• Maintained pipelines to create an explorable underwater cave system facilitating full-axis-traversal gameplay. Co-designed the player's UI/UX to meet the novel needs of this system of movement.

• Facilitated collaboration across disciplines by fostering a human-first game development mentality, improving production-velocity. Live-demonstrated the game to an audience of 300 people and shipped on time. 

Consequences Map

Encounter Designer, Spring 2022

• Explored design methodologies and development process of VR level and encounter design. Broadened my design expertise by developing a single-player FPS combat-experience using Source 2.

• Organized play-sessions and sought design critique from a mentor at Santa Monica Studio. Utilized gathered feedback to improve my design skill set. Entered the AAA game industry 4 months later due to this project and its lessons.