Industry Work
These are the main games I have worked on in a professional setting.
Toadled: Eating Frenzy is a dark comedy single-stick shooter developed by Giant Fox Studios. You start out as a baby toad and consume everything around you until you’ve become the size of the whole universe. The gameplay is somewhat similar to Vampire Survivors, except that instead of focusing entirely on movement, you focus entirely on aiming and shooting.
As the sole game designer on a small indie team, I’m in charge of balancing difficulty, designing items and upgrades, and creating quests and challenges. The game is under active development. We hope to release on PC soon, with potential ports to mobile and console afterward.
Ara: History Untold is a turn-based historical 4X game for PC developed by Oxide Games and published by Microsoft. Players lead their nation from the ancient era to the modern day and compete to gain the most prestige through progress in various domains. It distinguishes itself from its competitors by having simultaneous turns, a focus on production chains, and a procedurally generated map with arbitrary geometry instead of a grid.
My biggest personal contribution involved rebuilding the entire combat system. I designed new formulas, rebalanced unit stats, changed the leveling and damage type systems, and more. The main focus was on distilling things down so that armies could have a single strength number for players to compare, giving them a better idea of whether it’s smart to engage in combat. Simultaneous turns and infinite unit stacking presented a lot of interesting challenges for this side of the game.
Other than that, I mentored junior designers, iterated on the economy and the tech list, and designed and implemented unique traits for all 45 leaders in the game. I also audited thousands of city names and wrote historical flavor text.
Old World is a historical turn-based 4X game for PC developed by Mohawk Games. Set in the ancient Mediterranean world, it focuses heavily on narrative events. The main gameplay innovation is the orders system: instead of moving every unit once per turn, you have a limited resource called “orders” that you must distribute between all your units. Old World has an 80 Metacritic score and features on PC Gamer’s list of best PC strategy games of all time.
My main focus was on fleshing out the narrative event system. In practice, this involved designing a large number of events to try to figure out what kinds of hooks would be needed in the future for conditions, rewards, and so on. For example, a marriage proposal event might only trigger if your leader was not married, and a linked event about the wedding day would only trigger if you had accepted the proposal. This might provide a dowry reward with a dynamic value based on the number of cities in your empire, ensuring that it felt appropriate at any stage of the game.
Beyond that, I participated in regular playtests and submitted various design proposals to influence the overall shape of the game. A particular success was limiting the number of orders a unit could receive per turn so they could no longer instantly run across the entire map. I also helped define a more specific historical scope, starting after the Bronze Age Collapse and ending in the early medieval period. I made the lists of Wonders and personal names, iterated on the techs, came up with ambitions and family traits, and so on.
DomiNations is a free-to-play asynchronous strategy game for mobile developed by Big Huge Games (aka SecretNewCo). Players build a base and send armies to attack other players’ bases for loot. It’s closely inspired by Clash of Clans, but it uses a historical setting. As players make progress over what is likely to be years of real-world time, they move from the Stone Age to the Drone Age and beyond. The game has over 50 million downloads and a 4.5/5 rating on the App Store.
I designed various features and led teams to implement them. Some of these included the traveling merchant, expeditions, and the victory chest. Due to my background with history and languages, I was also tapped to write or edit flavor text for units, events, leaders, and so on. In fact, the company contracted me to continue writing for them after I stopped working there full-time.
Wind Catcher Games 