Featured Projects
Grounded
Time on Project: November 2019 - Present
Studio: Obsidian Entertainment
Engine: UE4 + Proprietary Tools
Role: Technical Designer
Grounded is a 3D multiplayer survival game. Set in the 1990s, the story follows a group of teens who must unravel the mystery behind why they have been shrunk to the size of an ant, while surviving within the vast and beautiful, but dangerous suburban backyard.
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As a technical designer on this project, beyond my normal responsibilities, I led various initiatives in development including the Arachnophobia Mode feature, outsourcing, analytics. In these efforts I collaborated with multiple external teams, such as the Microsoft Research Team, to develop research studies and development pipelines.
Internally, I worked on the level design of multiple dungeons and biomes, as well as the quest designs that took players through these spaces. I also developed the system designs for certain features in the game, such as the creature hearing perception system. Additionally, I lead R&D for new gameplay mechanics as well as developed the scripting modules for the designer toolkit that enabled designers to more efficiently iterate and implement their designs.
Arachnophobia Mode was nominated for the Innovation in Accessibility award at The Game Awards 2020.
The Outer Worlds
Time on Project: October 2018 - October 2019 (Release)
Studio: Obsidian Entertainment
Engine: UE4 + Proprietary Tools
Role: Technical Designer
The Outer Worlds is a 3D first-person role-playing game. Set in a future where megacorporations have begun colonizing and terraforming alien planets, a colony ship's faster-than-light travel goes astray, leaving it abandoned at the edge of colony space. The player character awakens on board from cryosleep only to find that most of the passengers are still in hibernation, and begins a journey to a nearby colony to investigate the true nature of the corporations.
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For this project I worked as a technical designer, wherein I lead efforts to research, design, and develop two complete pipelines for two new systemic features, created new modules that expanded previous audio implementation methods, and created editor tools that drastically improved audio pipelines.
Specifically, the first feature I owned was the game's Audio Spatialization feature, which allowed for audio to travel from room to room to the player via doors or other openings to create a more accurate geometric representation of sound, to deepen both immersion and gameplay experiences. Secondly I also lead the development of the game's Chatter system and its pipelines, which controlled the ambient VO lines (and their subtitles) for different gameplay purposes, such as enemy combat callouts and companion lines, and also for narrative events, such as ambient generic interaction NPC lines when they do not have a formal conversation. In both these instances, I did initial R&D to unit test a full implementation of the pipeline, then organized and lead efforts to spread that knowledge to others across-departments to enable full production of the feature, and finally became the point person should any part of the feature need optimization improvements or require unique one-off fixes.
Past that, I created modules using UE4 Blueprints that designers could use throughout the game to implement sound effects in optimized and better sounding ways, the most notable of which where a convex-hull zone sound emitter and a spline sound emitter. Finally, I accelerated pipelines and processes that would traditionally take designers hours to execute down to requiring only minutes to complete via tools powered by editor scripts, or more specifically, UE4 Blutilities.
The Outer Worlds was nominated for Game of the Year award at The Game Awards 2019 and has been nominated for and has received numerous other accolades.
God of War (2018)
Time on Project: August 2017 - February 2018
Studio: Sony Santa Monica
Engine: Proprietary
Role: Technical Designer - Audio Team
God of War (2018) is a 3D third-person action adventure game. God of War (2018) is a continuation of the critically acclaimed PlayStation series. Follow series protagonist Kratos as he ventures into the new lands of Norse Mythology and fatherhood.
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In this project I worked as a technical designer for the audio team, implementing audio assets into the various parts of the game. This included character sounds, environment SFX, combat SFX, environment sounds, etc. (essentially, everything but dialogue). I primarily used LUA scripts and a proprietary scripting language to insert these sound assets into the game.
Additionally, I sped up development time by decoupling the audio team from an inter-team dependent workflow. This involved creating and standardizing a system that allowed the sound team to change values through script rather than through exclusive-check-out files. With this new system, audio work could now be done on the same files in parallel with the other teams, speeding up the development process.
God of War was awarded for Game of the Year award at The Game Awards 2017 and has received numerous other accolades.
Hollowed
Development Time: 8 Months
Team Size: 17
Engine: UE4
Role: Technical Designer, Audio Implementer, Lead Marketer
Hollowed is a 3D side-scrolling puzzle platformer. In Hollowed, players control not one, but two characters... on the same controller, much like Starbreeze Studios' Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Hollow also takes inspiration from Playdead's Inside to create a world that provokes players' curiosity and asks them to create their own interpretations.
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In this project I worked as a tech designer, creating blueprints for gameplay mechanics. Additionally, I created blueprint tools that other designers, more specifically level designers, used to expand levels mechanically or aesthetically. This includes a pseudo-matinee blueprint and a grouping blueprint to trigger simultaneous material changes.
My other primary responsibility in this project was as the main audio implementer. In this role, I had to learn and use Wwise to integrate audio into the game. This varied from entering into the C++ code to post Wwise events, to creating/placing attenuated ambient sounds into levels, to going into animations and creating notifies for sounds, etc. Furthermore, I created the audio pipeline for taking sounds into Wwise, taking them into ProTools to mix, then back into Wwise, and finally, into UE4.
Finally, my last major role in this project was as the lead marketer. I established Project Polish Productions LLC to enable our student team to publish the game on digital distribution platforms at the end of the development time. I was also responsible for managing the team's social media presence to generate an audience for the game.
Hollowed was nominated for Best Student Game at The Game Awards 2017.
O
Development Time: 3 Months
Team Size: 8
Engine: Unity 3D
Role: Level Designer, Technical Designer
O is a one-button action survival game on mobile platforms. In O, players must survive for 30 seconds inside a ring full of hazards - but the only thing they can do is... jump. O started as a 2 week rapid prototype with a team of six. In the final showing to our peers, we received what could be considered "critical acclaim" from our colleagues. As such, another member from the original team and I decided to continue developing the game in our spare time as a pet project. The other four original members plus another two of our fellow students contributed as well when they could. The current plan is to release the game on app stores in June 2017.
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Initially, my role on O was as a level designer. As a level designer I communicated with the programmers on the team to develop a tool to help easily create and implement scripted events.
After the first 2 weeks, I shifted roles from level designer to tech designer, with the responsibility of expanding the UI. As such, one of the biggest tasks I had was to refactor the original rapid prototype code to be more sustainable. Apart from that, other notable accomplishments include expanding the event scripting tool mentioned earlier and additionally creating a player progress structure flexible enough to be usable for different monetization models.
Excommunicated
Development Time: 5 Weeks
Team Size: 2
Engine: UE4 (HTC Vive VR)
Role: Technical Designer
Excommunicated is a multiplayer VR non-vocal communication game. The goal for both players is to describe something (animal, plant, temperature, etc.) to the other player without any words. To assist in this, "meaningful junk" is littered throughout the environment that players may use in addition to pantomiming to create a non-vocal message. In this game of association, our goal was to explore the ways communication can occur in virtual reality.
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In this duo, I was responsible for the network programming. This involved creating/joining sessions and ensuring appropriate replication. An interesting hurdle in this project was that the default UE4 VR Motion Controller Pawn BP and the Motion Controller BP were not VR-ready, so I had to go through and modify these blueprints to allow for replication over a network to happen. That process was not the simplest, as it was my first time doing networking and more so because at the time of development, the VR BP's not being multiplayer ready was a relatively new problem and a lot of official forum posts were unanswered.