Senior Technical Designer

Senior Technical Designer, Firefighter, Generalist. Shipped 70+ enemy designs, starting world experiences, and multiple quest lines and events.

Ashes of Creation sold over 200k copies servicing peak concurrency of 30k+.

Combat Design - Enemies and Encounters

While on the Enemies team I designed over 100 NPC and encounter designs with more than 70 making it to Alpha 2 by 2026. Original workflow included heavy use of proprietary tools and data records. I pushed for heavier integration into the engine and the adoption of State Trees as part of our enemy design workflow. Our pivot to using State Trees increased the runtime performance of our NPCs by over 2X and increased our overall velocity of the team by giving us access to Unreal-based blueprinting and native code. Once that was unlocked, designers were now able to create custom state tree tasks, conditions, and evaluators without any resource dependencies from engineering and finalized functionality could be scheduled for nativization as scheduling permitted.

For a closer look at the development process head over and read my Goblin Deep Dive.

World Bosses

I am personally a big fan of raiding in MMORPGs so when there was an opportunity to make world bosses I jumped at the chance. I pushed for making at least 1 world boss for each biome in the world, writing 10 initial designs and eventually bringing 2 completed world bosses to the game.

Tumok the Wretched is a giant cyclops that wanders the early game areas of the Riverlands and is a 3 phased encounter. He uses the shamanistic powers granted by his totem tree to heal and summon spiritual hazards. Destroy his tree and he’ll give in to his primal rage!

Skla’Risha, Mother of Pain is a massive scorpion broodmother with a tough caliche carapice and a poisonous tail strike. She spawns many scorpion adds and creates large areas of quicksand to bury her enemies.

These titans would not slow players down as they would be aggressively sought out and killed on spawn since their releases.

Monster Coin Livestream

Similar to my work with world bosses I was chosen to lead the effort of prototyping the monster coin system for Ashes’ November 2024 livestream. Monster coins are a currency for players to spend to take control of various monsters found in the world of Verra. Players would pilot these monsters, able to freely move and have access to all of their abilities to attack other players or monsters during events or sieges.

With the aid of 1 engineer and supporting resources for VFX and audio we were able to deliver a functional prototype with a fully playable Ancient boss monster. During the livestream we piloted 2 of these bosses in battle against more than 60 players atop the colossal Tower of Carphin POI.

World Design - Population and Points of Interest

I was handpicked to work on a special strike team to fill out part of the world of Verra to support starting player experiences. As part of this team I mapped prospective player flows through the world from the moment they hit play. I identified gaps in content and locations where players would encounter unintended friction.

Around the starting town of Lionhold, with close direction from directors, I iterated on the batyard and surrounding population for a smoother introduction to combat and commission objectives including the creation of neutral alignment for use on NPCs throughout the game. I collaborated closing with world art to improve the level design and visual clarity to ensure those experiences work well in parallel to the tutorial quest line.

I also successfully designed and pitched the major POI Highwaymen Hills. An ancient ruin turned bandit fort deep in the forest, it served as a major leveling location for players leaving the early game. The paper design included strategic population placements including encounter groupings, patrolling disrupters, and rewarding named targets. Highwaymen Hills first appeared in the July 2023 livestream and went live with the release of Alpha 2.

NPC Attractors

As part of the work to make the world feel more alive I developed an NPC attractor system. Attractors are design-defined NPC interaction points in the world such as a camp fire for bandits to warm themselves by, a watering hole for animals, or training dummies for practicing soldiers. The implementation included registering attractors to NPCs passively on trigger overlaps, modular interaction state tree and subtree behaviors, and an in-world array of customizable interact locations and facing directions.

Narrative Design - Quests and Events

A major pillar of design for Ashes was that the player settlements served as the center for content in a region rather than bespoke quest hubs out in the world. The settlements were far off in the world away from the starting areas which gave the team the additional challenge of guiding players from the start in the world to these new, player-driven content hubs. This was done through corridor quest chains.

Corridor Quests

I developed 2 corridor quest chains for Ashes, “Slivers of the Past” and “Ancient Epitaphs.” Each quest lived in parallel to the tutorial quest chain and helped guide players out to prospective settlements.

Slivers of the Past had players slay a bandit commander laying siege to the starting area with unknown cultist connections. It led players through the Riverlands, exploring points of interest along the way before leading them to the New Aela settlement with a hint of nefarious imposters amongst their ranks.

Ancient Epitaphs explored the history left behind by the Vaelune race during the exodus from the world thousands of years before. Players gathered written record of the events in ancient writing and helped Vaelune historians piece together the mystery of what happened as their people fled their desert homeland to escape the Harbingers.

Harbingers

Leading up to the Alpha 2 milestone in December 2025 was the development of the Harbinger event system. I was in charge of developing the narrative design for the Harbinger Lord of the Jundark biome. This included high level narrative themes and traits for the character, mechanical design for their encounter, supporting quest lines to tell the story of the Harbinger Lord, and a high level raid dungeon design themed to the Harbinger Lord for use in a future milestone. The event also included massive “tendrils” that spread through the biome, filled with corrupted monsters and disrupting trade routes. Utilizing a voxel tool to define the tendril regions over large areas to integrate with the main event as it expanded.

As supplements to the main Harbinger event I also developed Forward Operating Bases for players to use a staging points as they attacked the Harbingers and the tendrils. The bases included progression rewards if players built them up including corruption protection, crafting stations, vendor rewards, and Harbinger related tasks to push back the zone’s corruption meter.

In the belly of the Harbinger were pocket dungeon areas for players to farm special equipment drops and corrupted resources. Working with close direction and constraints I was tasked with adding an competitive event called the Blood Hoard. The Blood Hoard was a corrupted chest filled with a big pile of high tier loot that players would fight over. Any person interacting with the Blood Hoard would be forcibly flagged for PvP. The first person to successfully channel a long interact on the chest would gain the rewards. I created all the functional parts of the event including the chest, its animation blueprint, the interaction data, and the forced PVP debuff.