Destiny 2: 30th Anniversary, The Witch Queen, Season of the Risen
Most recently, I worked on the quests for the Witch Queen campaign and Season of the Risen episodic story in addition to the combinatoric random weapon reward system for the seasonal Battlegrounds mode. I designed the end of year Moments of Triumph progression system as my first assignment at Bungie.
Kinetic: Personal Side Project in Unreal
In my spare time I am working on a Third Person Shooter prototype in Unreal Engine. It is a solo project where I am writing all of the logic and sourcing most of the art minus some custom FX I am creating for gameplay feedback. I am using the Unreal Gameplay Ability System developed for Paragon and used in Fortnite. I have lots of ambitions of where to take this project. Check out my development blog for the latest updates.
Minecraft: Mob (Creature) Component System Design
I lead the design of Minecraft’s datat driven Mob (Creature) component system. This made it easier to creat new Mobs by combining existing components and enabled Minecraft's first official modding system. Called Add-Ons, this system enables players to change the behaviors of creatures, items, blocks, and much more in the game. In this video you can see me and our lead Add-Ons programmer walk through the basics for modifying a Minecraft villager into your own personal bodyguard. I was so technically adept at modifying the game on the fly with this system, that I became the go to press demoer. I felt like a balloon artist taking press requests for what to modify next and delighting everyone with the results moments later.
Minecraft: Inventory & Crafting System Design
As the Minecraft codebase and community were unified across platforms in the "Better Together" update as seen in the video above, I redesigned the inventory & crafting systems to bring the divergent experiences across game pad, touch, and mouse/KB together. This included UX design of the menus, progressive reveal of info on what can be crafted, and recategorizing recipes to better scale in the future. I'm most proud of the balance we achieved in showing players what can be crafted while maintaining the speed of crafting for experienced players. The moment to moment improvements we made with animations were also super fun to see come to life.
Character Creator: Minecraft & Minecraft Earth
I am the design lead for the new Character Creator that spans traditional Minecraft and the new Minecraft Earth AR game. Along with our art and dev leads, I determined how many different item types can be customized, how all of those items interact and layer, how we would assign one of five rarity levels to each item, and then how much money or effort it would take to get each item type.  As we launch the feature, I will work as our Live Design lead with art production to balance our catalog of items to meet player demands, flesh out divers options for all players, and entice players to engage with both games more in order to earn new items.
Minecraft: Alien Invasion Showcase Level Design
I lead the design of a massive showcase level for the launch of Minecraft's creature component system and official modding tools. We wanted to create something dramatic that deserved a spot on the Xbox E3 stage, but this first version of our system had lots of limits. I lead the brainstorm that sparked the idea modern city that is under an alien invasion. Minecraft players love epic city builds and a few simple aliens with quirky behaviors would perfectly demonstrate the ability easily change Mob behaviors with the components. In the level, the player works their way through the city always headed toward the mother ship blowing up smaller flying saucers along the way. We took this level to E3 2016 to demo what was possible with the new Add-ons system.  In this video, you can see me and the lead programmer for Add-ons play through a portion of the level.
Minecraft: Realms Multiplayer System Design
I owned the design of our realms multiplayer service through its launch on PC/Mobile/Console through its first year and a half live for players. It is a subscription service that gives players their own private cloud hosted dedicated Minecraft server that they can access from any device. My role included designing how player configure who can join their server, what game modes can be played, and how players can share asynchronous screenshots & messages with each other. Players use that last bit to recap what has happened on the server to others who were offline during major community events. Realms has successfully grown to more than 500,000 subscribers since its launch.
Minecraft: Occulus Rift & Gear VR Design
I lead the UX design for porting Minecraft to Occulus Rift and Gear VR. Because I had already developed a cross platform UI design system that worked with mouse, controller, and touch, we were able to pick the elements of each that work best in VR. We took all our menus and projected them in front of the player in the world as a flat surface, treated the player’s gaze like a mouse cursor, used the button scale of touch to ensure targeting was simple, and the menu layouts from controller so that when a player switched between inputs everything felt natural. This video is our trailer for the VR edition of Minecraft. The picture is from a GDC event where we demoed Minecraft in VR.
Minecraft: HoloLens Prototype Design
I was one of the game designers on the initial prototype of Minecraft for HoloLens that we demoed at E3 2015. Never before had I created something that left so many people speechless even if a consumer release of this experience never quite made business sense. My design work included building a demo level, mapping gestures to control the new birds eye view control scheme, and working closely with programmers to iterate on the feel of the moment-to-moment experience of the demo. This video shows what we presented on stage at E3. I gave several behind-closed-doors demos with press at multiple events of this experience.
Project Spark: Guilty All the Same Level Design
I was a level designer and gameplay scripter for a collaboration between Project Spark and Linkin Park (affectionately referred to as Linkin Spark). We brainstormed with and iterated upon the band’s feedback as we created a video game music video that captured their themes of inner guilt and fear. I wrote about half of the script logic for the level including a method to stream in prefabs that tremendously helped performance. I also designed a new interface for modulating music within a level to expand our creative possibilities. This video shows a playthrough of the music video level.
Project Spark: Editor & UGC System Design
The UGC system was my pride and joy on Project Spark. Players could easily share all of their creations for other players to play. We tracked downloads and ratings of every shared item to then created a feed of trending content to help new players discover the best of the best. We even tracked how much effort players who created together or remixed each other's creations put into their portion of the work so that as the downloads and ratings racked up, we could appropriately distribute the XP and grind currency across the group. This system left creators excited to let other players remix their content rather than afraid of their work getting stolen.
Project Spark:Â Showcase Level Design
My first task when I joined Project Spark was to create as many game prototypes as I could in six months so that when we announced the game, we had a variety of showcase levels to demo the flexibility of what our game about making games could create. Talk about a dream job. Just prototype new ideas all day, every day? Sure! I created more than ten different levels that would be included in this announce trailer and demoed at E3 2013. This also cemented me as the resident scripting expert on the team since I spent so much time writing logic for so many kinds of experiences from 2D platformers to transforming jets to 3rd person stealth mechanics.
Xbox Live Arcade - Design Consultant
My first job at Microsoft was in Xbox Live Arcade reviewing pitches for new games and consulting on games Microsoft was publishing including Ori and the Blind Forest, State of Decay, and Charlie Murder. I learned a lot about contract negotiation, RFPs, green-light processes, and navigating certification in this role as I consulted on a dozen different titles.
Paradox Shift: Senior Project
This was my senior project in the USC School of Cinematic Arts - Interactive Media program (2011). The team I lead built a first-person puzzle game about time travel in which the player can switch between two different time periods before and after a disaster whenever they want. We leverage the Unreal engine and I personally built our first and final levels for the game. I'm particulalry proud of the level of polish we were able to incorporate into a student project. It went on be a finalist in the DICE Indie Game Challenge in 2012.