Example Design Work

Gameplay feature: scaled fall damage

On one of my recent projects, we had fall damage only above a certain height, and only when it would constitute a lethal fall. Players were continually surprised and confounded dying from fall damage, as it was often difficult to gauge the difference between a survivable and lethal fall in the game, due to the very organic nature of the world geometry. This is a proposal I wrote up, as a pitch to create a system for scaled fall damage, so that not only we could give more incentive to players to engage in collection and crafting game loops, but also give more value to healing items.

Once the creative director approved the proposal with some changes, I created the following metrics document to instruct the level designers how to implement their layouts such that they would adhere to metrics and our new fall damage categories, to give a consistent experience throughout the game.

This is a mockup for a UI feature for a fast-travel station I created for one of my projects. We wanted to show an in-world map to ground the interaction in the world, but at the same time we weren’t sure how many locations there would ultimately be. I wanted to create a simple interface that didn’t require the engineering team build a free cursor (which takes a lot of work to get feeling good on gamepad), and didn’t want to have to get into the large amount of bespoke setup that directional navigation between points that aren’t grid-aligned would require for gamepad input. So to avoid those problems, I designed a list-based interface that still had a map counterpart to keep the in-world feel and look of a map-based interface, but would be far more simple to build and maintain.

With the map and list interface, we could still show all the information we wanted to convey to the player, while limiting the amount of work we were signing ourselves up for as a small team.

For the same project, I designed this fly-out inventory menu. We needed the player to be able to manage their inventory quickly on the fly, without needing to pause the game simulation. So we needed something snappy to navigate both on gamepad and mouse, but that wouldn’t obscure the game view.

I created this mockup of a fly-out inventory menu. I made it tab-based in order to reduce the amount of items that players would have to navigate through, and make it simple and easy to find a given item. This also allowed us to institute inventory limits on a per-category basis — we could give the player unlimited “quest” item slots, while limiting the number of resource type items for gameplay and economy balance.