Role: Gameplay Designer, Producer
Engine: Unreal Engine 5, Core
Platforms: PC, Mobile, Console
October 2021 - August 2024

While at Manticore Games I worked on our creator platform Core, and then transitioned to a designer role on an unannounced open world sandbox MMO.

Core is an endless universe of games and worlds designed by a global community of creators. It's a radically accessible game construction kit, content exchange, and game-playing platform, all in one.

Gameplay Designer - Contributions

While working as a Gameplay Designer I designed, developed, and implemented many features and systems that touched most parts of the open world sandbox MMO I was working on. Although my primary focus was combat and player progression systems, I wrote design specs for a number of features ranging from complex character actions and abilities, to UI features like the minimap.

Player Ability System
I designed our player ability system to be flexible and allow designers to use simple building blocks to make complicated ability effects. Using my experience designing and creating fighting games, the ability system was built on top of similar concepts. Abilities would be broken up into multiple phases (start up, active, and recovery), with each phase following a simple rule set that determined its overall behavior. Designers were able to apply various effects, such as damage or visual effects, to a given phase to create the ability.

Because of the simplicity of the system, the design team was able to quickly implement and test dozens of abilities for both players and enemies. This also made it easy to talk about with other teams, and was beneficial when expanding the feature set to allow design to have more control over abilities.

Player Character Progression
Progression is key for an MMO, and it was important that players have a long tail to keep them engaged and excited about upcoming upgrades and unlocks. The progression was designed around the idea that players could quickly gain access to new upgrades and equipment, and that they were rewarded for continuing to specialize in a given task such as combat or crafting.

It was vital to allow players to unlock new things at regular intervals, which allowed them to quickly experiment with their options before choosing to specialize, and dig deep into the progression for the activities they most enjoyed. Combat players were rewarded with more complex combat interactions, higher stats, and more nuanced equipment. Crafting players were able to become more efficient when crafting specific items, allowing them to increase their profit margins.

Balance Tools
I would often build tools (usually in Google Sheets) that would allow designers to manage and balance various features. The biggest tool I built allowed us to keep track of the attributes for all items in the game, and would automatically calculate attributes for any piece of equipment at any level. This completely cut out the guesswork of balancing new items, and allowed for quick iteration with minimal data management. This tool was combined with a similar tool for enemies that was created by another designer, and together we were able to quickly balance enemy and player attributes together to get the difficulty and progression we wanted.

Workflow Improvement
Aside from the standard design duties, my desire to improve process continued as I constantly sought out issues with various design workflows, and worked with engineering to resolve them. These improvements were usually related to how our design team authored content, and over time I was able to streamline some of our workflows considerably, even on features that I didn’t design or work on often or at all.

Design Goals

It was my intent to design systems that appeared simple on the surface, and were easy to understand at a glance, that would eventually reveal hidden complexity to dedicated players. This was most evident in the combat and equipment designs. This is a set of equipment I designed that encouraged players to take on groups of enemies. The bleed effects of the weapon allow players to keep their DPS high when fighting multiple enemies, while the equipment is geared around surviving those enemies.

Weapon - Bloodletter Axe
This axe hits enemies in a wide arc, and is built around applying and maintaining the Bleed status effect on enemies.

• Ability - Rend

  • Deals damage in a wide cone in front of the player. Enemies hit by Rend have the Bleed status effect applied.

• Ability - Whirlwind

  • Deals damage 4 times in an AoE around the player. If a Bleeding target is hit, reduce active cooldowns of all other abilities by 0.5 seconds.

• Ability - Pursuit

  • The player leaps forward and slams their axe into the ground, dealing damage in an AoE, and slowing targets. If a Bleeding target is hit, reduce its armor by 25% for 3 seconds.

Armor - Bramble Mail
A suit of armor enchanted with the powers of the Earth. This is a heavy piece of armor that increases the players Health and Armor attributes substantially, and has one ability.

• Ability - Thorns

  • Applies the Thorns status effect to the player for 30 seconds. Each time the player receives damage, Thorns deals a set amount of damage in an AoE around the player. Every 5th time the player is hit, this effect deals 4x the normal damage.

Trinket - Shield Generator
Increases the players armor every time they take damage for 10 seconds. This effect can stack up to 5 times.

Ring - Blood Ring
Grants 5% lifesteal for 3 seconds when dealing damage to an enemy. This effect has a 20 second cooldown.