Design Samples

On End of Dragons, I was one half of a two-person team, building out a total of eight chapters of story missions for Guild Wars 2's third expansion. Besides my implementation work, I was also a key contributor to story and character development, writer's rooms, and wrote ambient dialogs and lore text for objects and quest items.

End of Dragons: Chapter 5 - The Scenic Route

In this episode, I take a look at our player's first introduction to New Kaineng City, and discuss some of the key components that informed my decisions in introducing this new region, as well as the ways in which we begin to add layers to some of our important characters to set up their arc in future chapters. This End of Dragons chapter was fully implemented by myself, in collaboration with partner team members in art, cinematics, design, and engineering. This chapter's tone and thematic structure was primarily about setting the stage for the second act, while also introducing one of the core game features for the expansion: Jade Bots.

End of Dragons: Chapter 6 - The Future In Jade

In this two part episode, I do a deep dive into one of the larger chapters in the expansion, which was comprised of two story instances, and two open world segments. I address the particular challenges in creating tutorials for a new feature, how to establish and maintain pacing when going into and out of story instances, how to build up a character from a one-dimensional antagonist to a more fully fleshed out character, and more. This End of Dragons chapter was fully implemented by myself, in collaboration with partner team members in art, cinematics, design, and engineering.

End of Dragons: Chapter 7 - Deepest Secrets

For this episode, I descend into the depths of one of the crowning achievements of my career to date. Deepest Secrets was not only one of the most complex and technical challenges I've ever had to contend with, it was also a hugely pivotal moment in our decade-long adventure in dealing with the Elder Dragons. I get a close look at all of the elements that went into the creation of this chapter (there's a lot!) and call out the parts that worked even better than had been anticipated. This End of Dragons chapter was fully implemented by myself, in collaboration with partner team members in art, cinematics, design, and engineering.

End of Dragons: Chapter 8 - Fallout

If Chapter 7 was my magnum opus for this expansion, then Chapter 8 would be my cozy little indie project. I discuss how I was able to take some risks in implementation and challenged conventional mechanics for the design of this chapter, including the long-standing dream I'd had of our worldly Commander doing something as mundane as meeting a friend at a restaurant and ordering food. I also describe the process of creating a creepy, horror vibe as players get to explore the ruins of Arborstone, and the details around meeting a famous Guild Wars character from ages past. This End of Dragons chapter was fully implemented by myself, in collaboration with partner team members in art, cinematics, design, and engineering.

End of Dragons: Chapter 9 - To Catch A Spider

Chapter 9 of End of Dragons was a particular challenge as it really tested our ability to tell convincing and crucial story in the open world, as the bulk of the content was not in instanced maps. I talk at length about the benefits and drawbacks of non-instanced story content and characters, as well as the technical hurdles I had to overcome to make this chapter work. This End of Dragons chapter was fully implemented by myself, in collaboration with partner team members in art, cinematics, design, and engineering.

End of Dragons: Chapter 13 - Extraction Point

The thirteenth chapter of End of Dragons is another exclusively open world chapter, and I cover some of the challenges associated with trying to tell a compelling story that runs parallel to tThis End of Dragons chapter was fully implemented by myself, in collaboration with partner team members in art, cinematics, design, and engineering.This End of Dragons chapter was fully implemented by myself, in collaboration with partner team members in art, cinematics, design, and engineering.he map-wide meta event story, which is also a key part of the overall narrative. This End of Dragons chapter was fully implemented by myself, in collaboration with partner team members in art, cinematics, design, and engineering.

End of Dragons: Chapter 17 - The Cycle, Reborn

This chapter served as the epilogue to not only End of Dragons itself, but to the entire Elder Dragon saga, which began in 2012 with the launch of Guild Wars 2. I discuss the pressures of how to end a decade-long saga in a satisfying way, while constrained by a moderate budget and scope for content creation. I also discuss the wonderful moment at the end for two of our long-running characters, and the way that it came together to deliver a heartwarming conclusion to the story of End of Dragons.

For Path of Fire, I primarily served as the Story Team Lead, but I also implemented three of the expansion's early story instances, and played a key role in story breaking and reviews of the overall story.

Path of Fire: Chapter 1 - Sparking the Flame

This clips shows both the introductory prologue chapter in Lion's Arch, and the initial tutorial instance for Path of Fire, which includes the players first experience of the mounts in this expansion. Implementation was completely my responsibility and included character movement, combat encounter design, VO timing and pacing, environment and effect animation timing, and overall staging and composition. This chapter was important to introduce the main antagonist for the first Act of the story, but also to tutorialize the first mount in the mastery system, the raptor.

Path of Fire: Chapter 3 - Night of Fires

For this chapter, the player is first sent out to the open world to assess the threat of the Forged at their camps, and then once they understand the risks, they infiltrate the main base under cover of night, looking for the rogue god of war, Balthazar. Implementation on both the open world section, and the instance was my chief responsibility. I deliberately wanted the gameplay in the night mission to feel like an old school vanquishing mission from Guild Wars 1, but in service to making sure the player had a broader choice of tactics, it's also possible (but quite challenging) to sneak your way through many of the encounters leading up to the Temple of Kormir.

Path of Fire: Chapter 4 - The Sacrifice

For this chapter, the player finally catches up to Balthazar and his Herald, and face an act-closing cinematic confrontation with the god of war! Implementation on this chapter was my responsibility, and included close coordination with the cinematics team to implement a coordinated, epic encounter between Balthazar and Vlast, first scion of the champion Glint. In this chapter, since the latter half was primarily composed of heavier cinematic moments, I opened the gameplay up in the first half, and simply let the player explore and gather clues leading them to the inevitable conclusion.

My design work on Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns included several story instances, open world story, story journal integration, and acting as team lead for the other story designers, in collaboration with narrative designers and leads, cinematics artists and studio directors. At Arenanet, story designers are paired with a writer for each instance; although designers can contribute dialog, the writers come through and do their own pass on everything to meet our narrative standards. Where I remember this information, the writers will be credited below.

Heart of Thorns: Chapter 4 - The Jungle Provides

This "Let's Play" walk-through shows the first story instance I was responsible for creating for HoT. I did full implementation of the entire instance, including the branching player choice to either attack the Mordrem camp or defend the Itzel village. As story designer, I was responsible for all character scripting, encounter design, game mechanics unique to this instance and cinematics. Dialog and writing by Scott McGough. I'm particularly proud of how we established the Itzel and Nuhoch tribes of Hylek here, and while the player choice presented a few challenges that we didn't foresee, we were very happy with how both options played out and felt equally compelling.

Heart of Thorns: Chapter 6 - Prisoners of the Dragon

This "Let's Play" walk-through shows off one of the missions I did full implementation on. I designed the narrative flow, alongside our writers, and scripted all of the characters, encounters, mechanics and cinematics. Dialog and writing by Scott McGough. This chapter was special to me because of the gravity of the way that the mission concludes. We had a charged emotional moment to deliver, and I believe we were successful.

Heart of Thorns: Chapter 13 - Buried Insight

This "Let's Play" video captures one of my other HoT story missions. As with the other two, I was responsible for scripting the entire mission including all of the characters, the combat encounters and the narrative moments. Dialogue was written by one of our writers, Ross Beeley, with some input and assistance by myself. This instance went through a complete redesign mid-development. Despite these setbacks, the instance really came together and was a tremendous opportunity for us to showcase one of our amazing new characters, Taimi.

Living World Festival of the Four Winds

This episode of my "Design Deconstructed" series takes a look at the narrative, content and environmental design for a recently revived in-game festival, "Festival of the Four Winds". As one of the original designers on the 2013-14 releases of this content, it fell to me to refurbish it for 2018 and beyond, and devise content that would be evergreen so that it could return on an annual basis. I also used my work on this festival to heal some personal traumas and imbue the work with an emotional core that I hoped would encourage players to form connections and experience a greater sense of community.

Living World Season 4, Episode 4: A Shattered Nation

This clip from my series "Design Deconstructed" is a deep dive behind the scenes look at my last Living World episode. I was not completely responsible for this chapter, as I took it over from a previous designer who left the company, but I did shepherd this instance from about 60% completion to ship, and was chiefly responsible for the polish phase and addressing feedback and refining gameplay. Narrative duties were shared with the writer, Samanthan Wallschlaeger. I had a great time working closely with the animation, cinematics and art teams on key parts of this chapter.

Living World Season 2, Episode 8: Arcana Obscura

This clip from my series "Design Deconstructed" shows off one of the Living World story instances I was responsible for implementing. I only had about six weeks to build this instance from script generation to passing first playable, so I kept it pretty simple and delved deep into our world's lore. Dialogue and writing by Bobby Stein. Despite how quickly this episode chapter had to come together, this is actually one of my favorite experiences that I've had the pleasure to implement; it has juicy lore moments, some great nostalgic gameplay and the setting was just so much fun to be playing in.

Living World Season 1: Nightmare's End

This "Let's Play" clip shows off the conclusion of the story of the "Tower of Nightmares", one of the large scale events that took place in Living World Season 1. This was a short instance in which I did all the scripting and encounters, including some fun puzzle mechanics, and I needed to pull together months of story-telling and conclude the story with a world-altering conclusion (it radically changed one of our Live maps). Dialogue and writing was done by Angel McCoy. Doing puzzles of any sort in a game that is so focused on combat mechanics is sometimes a challenge, but I'm happy with how it turned out.

Living World Season 1: The Nightmare Unveiled

This "Let's Play" clip shows off the beginning of the story of the "Tower of Nightmares", one of the large scale events that took place in Living World Season 1. This instance was designed to set up the story for the overarching release cycle, and also set up a massive change to one of our core maps by inserting a monolithic tower spouting toxic fumes into the area. I scripted all of the instance with writing by Angel McCoy. The part of this instance I am proudest of was the moment of uncloaking this massive tower that players didn't even know was there.

Living World: Festival of the Four Winds

This short clip shows off one of the fun events I created for the Labyrinthine cliffs, a map which utilized special crystals to imbue players with fantastic movement abilities. In this variation, I wanted to use these mechanics along with a transform that turns players into a baby dolyak, and this is the adorable result. :-)

Living World Season 1: Flame and Frost "Retribution"

This "Let's Play" clip shows one of the first major story instances I designed; a 5-player dungeon called the "Molten Facility". I scripted half of this dungeon along with another designer Lena Chappelle, with writing by Angel McCoy and Elan Stimmel. My responsibility was scripting the through line and character moments with Rox and Braham at the beginning, middle and end, while Lena created the lava puzzle room and the final boss encounter. One of the funnest challenges that I solved in this episode was how to simulate a boring machine drilling into the side of a wall (we don't really have an innate ability to have moving collision due to technical limitations). Overall, that came out feeling incredibly good considering how hacky our solution was.

Guild Wars 2: Hoelbrak

A big part of my initial design responsibilities at Arenanet was populating four of the game's major world cities. These were monumental tasks, because of how large we tend to build things at the studio, so filling those spaces with enough NPC's and ambient chatter and dialog, to make sure that they feel alive, is no small feat. Hoelbrak is the home of the norn, a race of half-giants who live for hunting, carousing and building their legends. This clip shows off the city in depth, and you can see and hear the work I did, it's also finely balanced to be subdued because we knew players would be spending hours and hours in these places, and hearing the same dialog and seeing the same actions over and over again grows quickly tedious.

Guild Wars 2: Lion's Arch

As with Hoelbrak, I built the initial version of Lion's Arch prior to the game's launch (it has since been destroyed, and then completely rebuilt), and filled it with all manner of NPC's and creatures and lots of fun hidden little stories and adventures. The theme of the city was that it was founded by pirates, so it had a sort of rogue-ish charm that I worked hard to instill in the ambient scenes, dialogs and characters. There's also a really fun ghost pirate jumping puzzle that I co-designed with Josh Foreman which I'm especially proud of. The challenge with this city is that because it was the main hub for the game it had to pull in all the races and all of the different themes we'd been establishing for the world of Tyria, but I was very proud of how this city felt.

Google Sites

Report abuse