Cancelled Title
Lead Systems Designer
A live service open-world game with novel progression mechanics focusing on discovery, mastery, and player autonomy.
Unfortunately, following the cancellation of this project, I was affected by SIE Sony Bend’s substantial layoff.
● Led the Progression team of 5+ developers across multiple disciplines.
● Owned all progression and economy systems from ideation to implementation and maintenance.
● Created comprehensive documentation across all levels of development—including expressing designs for leadership approval, blueprints for implementation, and broader studio communication.
● Oversaw the balancing of the global economy, including enemy drops, weapon availability, ammo economy, open world item population, vendors, pricing, event rewards, and reputation rewards.
● Mentored junior to senior-level designers, improving team collaborations and output.
● Collaborated closely with directors to ensure constant alignment with project goals.
● Led cross-disciplinary collaborations, especially UX/UI to create intuitive interfaces for complex systems, and VFX and Sound to complete holistic design intentions.
● Maintained epics and backlogs to track active and planned development.
● Led UXR initiatives by creating assets and testing plans to validate our designs.
Additional details coming soon
Days Gone
Associate Systems Designer
A brutal and unforgiving open world where players scavenge what they can to survive the continual onslaught of the zombie-like freakers or other survivors.
● Owned progression and economy systems including character progression, inventory management, crafting, consumables, and reputation systems.
● Balanced the global economy, including enemy drop rates, item population, vendors, rewards.
●Innovated loot systems to accommodate player needs while maintaining a theme of desperation.
● Led a small team of 3 designers to populate the world with items using realistic, balanced rulesets.
● Created tools to streamline pipelines, reducing iteration time from several days to minutes.
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Hyper Syntax
Space Ships, Light Trails, Competition
This competitive 3D ship-flying game forces players to adapt to increasingly dangerous maps as they leave behind perpetual trails of light. Colliding with these trails, or anything else, blows them up! Joining this project, after pre-production, I was tasked with systems design: balancing and mechanic design.
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Astrocyte
Disease, Swirling Nano Bots, Science
For capstone, my small team created this educational sci-fi simulation game with incredibly compelling mechanics. We took big risks with a new engine, an unproven gameplay style and a requirement for a lot of real science to be researched.
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