Game Designer
Hello! I’m a Game Designer II at Riot Games working on VALORANT. I helped ship VALORANT on consoles in 2024 and am currently focused on an unreleased project.
I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Game Design from the University of Central Florida in 2017 while working at Falcon’s Creative Group as an Interactive Designer. At Falcon’s I fell in love with theme parks and creating immersive experiences in AR/VR, working on projects for 343i, National Geographic, and Busch Gardens.
After that I worked as a Game Designer at PlayQ, shipping Treasure Party in 2022.
GitHub: https://github.com/blaster73 itch: https://blast.itch.io
Other Responsibilities
Exploring new blue sky design space in response to product opportunities.
Quickly “finding the fun” in playtesting by parsing player feedback, taking calculated risks in design, and understanding when to cut losses.
Revisiting old designs and ensuring they hold up to our latest understanding of the game. And when they don’t, championing updates through our release pipeline.
Balancing elements of new releases into our existing game modes.
VALORANT - Xbox/Playstation, 2024
Game Designer II - Responsibilities
Designing and overseeing the creation of an updated New Player Experience targeted at introducing console FPS players to the tactical shooter genre.
Focusing on player first design, striving to understand the audience, and advocating for our players in production conversations.
Rapid prototyping content in Unreal Engine. From level design to final blueprint scripting implementation.
Collaborating with other disciplines like Engineering, Creative, Production, and QA to ship AAA quality story-driven experience.
Vision holding and leading the design through various phases, from early concepts to ship.
Website
Treasure Party - Android/IOS, 2022
Treasure Party is a live service, tap-to-match, puzzle game with a board game styled meta layer.
My Role: In addition to a traditional game design role my primary focus was on developing live content. This included setting up a standard pipeline for cutscenes, collaborating with the art and programming teams to ensure new content and features are implemented, and being the final set of eyes to check for issues before QA.
Game Designer - Responsibilities
Creating and ideating on gameplay systems and features in a collaborative environment.
Maintaining a live service schedule of content by coordinating with other teams and implementing content in Unity.
Creating and maintaining game design documents and specs.
Scripting gameplay logic using a node based editor.
App Store page
Chimp Chat/Gorilla Chat - Location Based, 2021
Chimp Chat was created for the Jane Goodall Institute and adapted for the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund as Gorilla Chat. Chimp Chat is a location based experience where players interact with chimpanzees and mimic their vocalizations to learn more about them.
Lead Interactive Designer - Responsibilities
Game, UX, and Systems design + documentation
Programing everything from the UI to the simple vocal recognition in C#
Creating deliverable documentations and flow charts for client milestones
Setting up a closed PC system with configuration guides for on-site deployment and hardware setup
Setting up animator and triggering the animations for the digital chimpanzee
Virtual Experience Walkthrough
More Details
Unity Weather - Android/IOS, 2020
Unity Weather is a solo project I made to explore the mobile and further develop my experience with RESTful apis. It displays a 3D environment with weather representing the user’s current real world weather gathered from https://openweathermap.org/api.
Responsibilities
Game/UX/UI Design
Programming (C#, REST, Regex, Source Control/GIT)
App deployment
More Details
Other Projects
Shipbreaker Reset - 2021
Top down horror game made for indiegalactic space jam. Players are tasked with shutting down deadly robots. I was a game and level designer.
Halo: Outpost Discovery - 2019
Travelling convention. I was a story guardian and junior writer making sure that the experiences were authentically Halo.
SUCPOP - 2021 - Solo project
2D infinite scroller created for GMTK game jam. Join and break the two points to interact with the environment.
MICROMANCER - 2024
VR Motion base ride. I was a technical artist working in a proprietary engine for displaying rendered CG movies in VR.
Apollo 13.5 - 2019 - Solo project
First person narrative game where players complete small gameplay experiences to learn about this secret astronaut. Received third place in the indiegalactic space jam.
Waterfront - 2020 - Solo Project
This was an Unreal Engine project I created to get more familiar with the engine. I focused on Blueprints and level design
bendesign.dev - 2022 - Solo project
I wanted to create a new portfolio website using React and Github Pages so that I could have more control over the layout and potentially adjust information displayed based on the URL. It will eventually replace this website.
Cut Cut Buffet - 2017
VR food slicing game. Created with 1 other developer, I was a systems and UX designer as well as 3D and texture artist.
Aleph Null - 2016
VR platformer game made for the HTC Vive and my first solo project. I was and still am incredibly excited at the prospect of VR games!
