Respawn Entertainment
At Respawn Entertainment, I initially joined as a Senior Encounter Designer on an in-progress Star Wars First-Person-Shooter game that was already in development. My role saw me as a liaison of sorts between the Mission Design team and the Combat Design team. This meant that I would be responsible for helping the Combatant team in shaping out enemy behaviors and composition, roles, etc. while also building test spaces and mission-style environments for the Combat designers and devs to work in. I oversaw all encounters in the main game, working with mission designers to iterate on them and establish guidelines on how to best set up encounters. I helped build and manage spaces in the game to best take advantage of the enemy AI’s abilities, and used my previous experience as a Principal Level Designer to help establish setting, framing, and staging.
I also wrote documentation on Encounter Design as a general discipline and helped to teach newer MDs who weren’t as experienced with understanding the nuances of composition and timing on their encounters, and provided “best practices” for different kinds of environment-focused encounter spaces.
I wrote mock up-documentation of proposed tools to help manage and control the flow of encounters that would allow designers to make engaging, dynamic battles without ever having to open Blueprint if they didn’t want to. I created documentation for asset types that would allow designers to uniquely spawn and manage enemy combatants, and allow for variety with each playthrough that would be easy for a designer to use and set up.
The Star Wars FPS project was unfortunately cancelled in February of 2024:
Since then, I’ve remained at Respawn, working on various unannounced prototypes and ideas (none of which I can talk about!) .