Position: Jr. Game Designer

Factor 5 was my most recent place of employment where I was brought on as a Jr. Game Designer. I was working on an unannounced casual title for the Nintendo Wii.

My main duties were to implement missions based on the activities outlined in the design doc. Most of what I did was to create fun missions/activities using object placement. We had "design kits" which were essentially just a group of assets that were made to function with certain mission types. How they were placed throughout the environment determined the experience given to the player. For example, if a mission was to destroy a number of targets I would vary the mission by changing the number, type, and placement of the targets. The missions were designed to be played in 5-15 minute increments and players had a wide variety of activities to choose from.

I also did a lot of spline creation and manipulation. Splines were used to create very simple AI pathing in a 3D space where we could adjust the speeds by just plugging in a new value. Our system was really user friendly and also data driven. We were able to take objects and attach properties to them to allow them to do different things depending on the mission/activity. Adjusting those properties was as simple as checking a box or entering a new value into our tool's UI. The project I was on had very little scripting but was something I wanted to get deeper into before my employment had ended.

Since we had a brilliant tools team and I liked to break stuff, given my experience as a tester, I really enjoyed testing out the new tools and features that were being implemented in our engine. We had a lot of objects to render inside of our editor which made things pretty slow at times. I would constantly try and help narrow down some issues we would be having, like geometry disappearing or scaling improperly. I had given lots of feedback for our tools team and even wrote proposals for new features to make everyone's life much easier.

I loved working on this project because it taught me a lot about designing for casual players as opposed to my previous experience designing for the hardcore players. I better understood how to adjust difficulty and make things more accessible to new users while still providing a challenge for more experienced players.

Since there is almost always some down time in a game studio, I spent mine working on a boss encounter document for the classic remake 1942: Joint Strike. This was the first design document I had ever written and so I learned quite a bit in the process. I spent a few weeks, when I wasn't working on Death Jr., coming up with all of the abilities, phases, and weak points for the first and final boss encounters. The original idea was to make the final boss an upgraded and more difficult version of the first boss.

I loved working on this project because it taught me a lot about breaking things down into every little detail and also organizing it within a document so that it's easy to read quickly. The final version ended up being about 90% the same as when I initially wrote the document even though I had only worked on those encounters for a few weeks. I would have loved to work on it for the remaining months till release, but I had to get back to school and finish my degree. If you would like to see where I am in the credits, my name is at the bottom of the special thanks page.

1942 Boss Design Document

Position: Game Tester

I spent the summer of 2006 working as a game tester at Konami in Redwood City. Working as a tester was great because it ultimately got me an internship with Backbone Entertainment the following summer. Being able to properly document and reproduce bugs is a skill that I believe to be very important to any developer. Being able to clearly explain what is happening, what is supposed to happen, and why certain things aren't happening is very valuable.

Through professional game testing, I learned how to compartmentalize my thinking as a player, as a tester, and as a designer. They are all very similar but also separate.