It’s a strange thing to make a portfolio as a gameplay designer; I can point you at things I worked on and you can look at videos but unless you go play my work you’re as likely to react to work I can’t claim credit for as not–animation, modeling, sound design etc. Anyway, with that caveat out of the way.
Riot Games — League of Legends
Still a very popular ADC, this was my first shipped product as a designer. I’m particularly proud of the novel input scheme I developed for his ultimate, where we lock the attack vector of Lucian’s barrage of shots at cast time and your only inputs during the ultimate are various ways of repositioning your character, navigating the dual pressures of remaining safe while keeping as many of your bullets on target as possible.
Azir, the Emperor of the Sands
Probably my most ambitious character, which wasn’t a great idea for my second project. Still considered one of the hardest characters to master, especially at the pro play level, Azir brought a whole new way of auto-attacking to the game, placing Sand Soldiers that act as proxy sources for his auto attacks. This forces the player to constantly look at multiple entities to see if enemies are within range. It’s incredibly difficult, but some players find this enjoyable.
Azir also turned the previously non-interactive turret ruins into a gameplay-relevant object by virtue of his passive, which lets him resurrect a destroyed turret for a short time.
The mission statement, flawed as it was, was to create a tank that didn’t express tank power through either long duration single-target lockdown or AOE teamfight initiation. We all learned an important lesson: a negatively phrased mission statement isn’t very workable. There was this implicit assumption that another viable tank output must exist. We ended up designing an unholy hybrid between a fight-heavy bruiser played in top lane and an extremely single-note protective warden played in support. Once again, pro play shaped my design to the point that it became very hard to balance for normal level play. Fortunately, Riot has reworked the core problem in the champion since my leaving, swapping its W and R around. I remember playtesting this but not having the courage to put the character’s raison d’etre, the devour, on his ultimate.
Still a very popular character, especially for duos where you really care about keeping your friend alive.
A much more straight-forward character. The mission statement I helped craft was to create a traditional mid-lane mage based on an elemental power. We ended up choosing rock, but giving Taliyah that Riot trademark twist in making her not a Stonecarver but a Stoneweaver. The textile metaphor, which is deeply rooted in her backstory coming from a nomad tribe of textile artists, is at the core of every ability, both visually and gameplay-wise. There is a pronounced, loom-like rhythm to her Q, her W and E demand an artist’s sense of space and anticipation. I’m still probably proudest of her gameplay of everything I worked on.
Knowing this would be my final project in character design (I had already agreed to switch teams to systems design after this character, feeling a need to stretch my design-legs) I worked with my lead to find something sufficiently ambitious and mic-drop-like. So I designed a character that has a choice between two fundamentally different gameplay classes halfway through the match. When Kayn amasses enough energy from fighting enemies, the player can choose to become either a speedy, bursty, but fragile assassin or a tanky, lifesteal-focused juggernaut. What’s more, your decision to pick fights with either ranged or melee enemies in the first 15 minutes or so of the game decides which option you’re offered first.
I’m still in shock this character worked as well as he did, immediately becoming one of the most popular characters in League of all time. I’d also learned my lesson regarding pro play: the highly telegraphed nature of Kayn’s ganks simply does not work well in pro play outside some very specific circumstances, and so he remained blessedly unchanged from the pressure of professional play. He’s seen some picks but was never really considered meta. That was by design.
Respawn Entertainment — Apex Legends
The particular challenge here was to make a mobility-focused character for a game that was rightly suspicious of excess mobility. Respawn had done some post-mortems on their previous Titanfall multiplayer games and found that excess mobility and the confusion and chaos that come with it were probably major contributing factors to those games’ lack of success in multiplayer. So Apex was built from the ground up to keep mobility to a reasonable level.
Of course I had to work on a jetpack character.
I think we ended up solving the problems very elegantly, not just that: we also used Valkyrie to point the way to future mobility based characters by showing off what trade-offs work and how the damage from particularly vertical mobility can be offset. Valkyrie went on to become Apex’s best selling character on launch.
Lead Roles
While it may be hard to properly show off work when you’re a game designer working with a huge team of artists, QA analysts, and engineers, it’s even harder to talk about the work one does as the lead of a team. I do not feel comfortable putting any of the work people reporting to me did in here, but I’ll briefly mention the teams I led.
At Respawn, I led the character design team roughly from Rampart to Ash; the designers who built Ash and Mad Maggie directly reported to me and while the rest of the team, out of the Respawn Vancouver office, had their own lead, I was closely involved in mentoring and guiding them. I was ultimately responsible for the quality of any of the characters that shipped.
I also led the live balance team at the same time.
At Tencent TiMi I was responsible for the design output of a large character design team, but due to the team being in China I didn’t directly lead any of them. The game has not yet launched.
At Playgig, I was design lead for the entire studio. I had two designers reporting to me, one in level design, one in character design. I mentored them and was responsible for the quality of their work, but also worked directly in Unity a lot. The game Mystic Kingdoms has not yet launched.
At Anykraft, I was again the design lead for the entire startup. I had two Korean designers under me whose work I directed and whom I mentored and advised, and once again I did a lot of work in Unity directly. The game Neon Runners has not yet launched.