Resume
Click here to download my resume (.pdf)
Experience
Senior Systems & Economy Designer / Sumo Digital, UK
April 2021 – March 2025
(NDA) / PC & Consoles
(NDA) / PC & Consoles
(NDA) / PC & Consoles
- Designed and balanced metagame & economy systems on a number of games for PC and consoles
- Managed large collections of item data in UE5
- Worked with engineers to optimise live data pipelines
- Taught designers to structure features and content with live updates in mind
- Created presentation on economy design for work experience teens
Game Designer / Freelance
February 2020 – April 2021
(Various) / Mobile
- Remote contract work on various projects during the Covid pandemic
Principal Game Designer / Longbow Games, India
November 2018 – January 2020
(NDA) / Mobile
- Led the design for a strategy game prototype, developed under contract for a major publisher
- Co-hosted presentations to senior publishing executives
- The prototype was well-received and taken in-house for pre-production
- Worked with in-house designers to solve difficult problems
Game Designer / Neon Play, UK
June 2015 – March 2018
Traffic Panic: Boom Town / Mobile
Bravo Force / Mobile
Escape Hunt: The Lost Temples / Mobile
Tip Tap Soccer, Tip Tap Rio, Tip Tap Farm / Mobile
(Other unannounced projects) / Mobile
- Core gameplay & metagame design for F2P mobile games
- Technical maintenance of game data (writing data schemas, export scripts, managing data deployment on the server, etc)
- Devising A/B tests and analysing results
- Greyboxing 3D level concepts
- Writing in-game text
- Prototyping game ideas using Unity, Playmaker, and paper prototyping
- Market research & user analysis
Associate Game Designer / Zynga, India
January 2012 – February 2014
Hidden Shadows / Facebook
Hidden Chronicles / Facebook
Empires & Allies / Facebook
- Core game and social features (matchmaking, social loops, viral mechanics, etc)
- Live game economy management
- Writing for new campaign content
- Managing object data in XML and JSON
- Qualitative analysis of gameplay data
- Training juniors and interns.
Systems Test Engineer / Promethean PLC, UK
January 2010 – October 2011
Hardware and software testing for interactive classroom products
Systems Tester / Northern Rock PLC, UK
September 2006 – July 2007
Online system testing, test team administration.
Education
MA Digital Games Theory and Design
Brunel University / London, UK / 2007 – 2008
BA (Hons) Economics with a Year in Europe
University of Leicester / Leicester, UK / 2002 – 2006
University of Gothenburg / Gothenburg, Sweden / 2004 – 2005
Skills
General Game Design
- Experienced in a wide range of genres, platforms, and working contexts
- Arena shooters, sports games, team FPS, casual arcade games, real-time strategy, idle games, and more!
- Casual, social, midcore, competitive PvP (real-time and asynchronous), single-player… and more!
- 2 years working on social games for the web, 7 years in mobile games, and 5 years making games for PC / Consoles
- Large MNCs, small indie studios, co-development projects, publisher-contracted work, self-published games, from initial ideation through to launch, live service, and sunsetting
- Critical eye for writing and reviewing design docs
- As a former software tester I have a knack for spotting edge cases, loopholes, and the like
- As an economy designer, I’m sensitive to the long-term / large scale impact of new features
- Having worked on a lot of gacha-based games in the past, I have a lot of experience in designing pseudo-random player experiences
- Having worked on so many live games, I think a lot about the ROI of design features – I habitually look for ways to make things cheaper and more reusable
- Flexible attitude
- Game development doesn’t always go according to plan, and I try to anticipate this in my work – designing features that can be quickly resized and rebalanced, if the situation changes
- Teamwork
- Mentoring interns and juniors in the dynamics of working in game development, how to write good specs, how to communicate clearly with other disciplines, etc
- Probing other discipline experts to understand their perspective on the project, and where the low-hanging fruit can be found
- Organised a weekly ‘design lunch’ while at Zynga, where designers from all project teams would get together to give presentations, discuss problems and solutions, and check in with each other
- Commonly-used software and tools
- I’ve worked on games made in Unity and Unreal (and some less-common engines like Game Maker)
- I’m experienced with JIRA and ADO, Git, Sourcetree and Perforce
Live Games
- Extensive experience working on live games
- Every game I’ve worked on professionally has been a live service title
- Developing tools and processes to make updates faster, cheaper, and easier
- Working with engineers to develop smooth and effective data pipelines
- Creating spreadsheets that transform intuitive tuning inputs into exportable data tables
- Working with analytics in mind
- Defining what data we should collect, to inform feature tuning decisions
- Identifying other data we could collect, to inform future strategic decisions
- Devising engagement funnels for features
- Designing for A/B tests, and teaching other non-experts about basic methodology
- Qualitative interpretation of analytics data – helping quantitative analysts to relate data trends to particular game updates, or changes in the wider market
- Designing events, seasonal updates, and live ops features
- Defining WHAT we will do, WHY we will do it, and HOW we will manage it
- Working with PMs to design backend tools to manage live service features
- Multiplayer leagues, seasonal resets, etc
- Skill ranking & matchmaking systems
- Designing & balancing Elo skill ranking systems
- Understanding what makes a game suitable for Elo skill ranking, and when you need to step up to a Bayesian system
- Understanding Bayesian skill ranking well enough to know that it requires a professional mathematician (seriously, it’s a LOT more complicated than Elo)
- Designing matchmaking systems
- Bridging gaps between Product and Design teams
- Helping designers to relate their features to our KPIs
- Helping PMs to understand what the player experience of their ideas would be
- Mentoring designers to design their features with live service tools in mind
- Planning analytic events during feature design
- Structuring feature config data for flexible live data updates
- Designing features with the assumption that you will want to add more content, someday
Systems & Economy Design
- Flowcharts and Spreadsheets – the raw ichor of economy design
- Compiling collections of design docs into a coherent economy flow diagram
- Evaluating whether the current designs are fulfilling the metagame vision
- Designing (or redesigning) features to bridge the gaps between the vision and current reality
- Modelling the economy in spreadsheets, to simulate the player experience…
- …rearranging the model to create an intuitive balancing tool (ie. turn desired outputs into inputs)
- Good understanding of the underlying, abstract economic issues at play
- I’ve worked on a lot of different games and have a range of tools and models to draw from
- Even if I haven’t worked in your specific genre before, I can probably figure it out
- Algorithmic system design
- I have created many spreadsheets that use a few key design inputs to procedurally generate a complete set of data for export – I have never worked on a procedurally-generated game, but I have experience of that mode of thinking
- Lest we forget: I do have a degree in economics
- If I start using terms you don’t recognise, bear in mind I’m not just cribbing ideas from GDC talks
- In case you’re curious, my dissertation was a study of economic altruism in World of Warcraft
Other Things
- Plays a wide variety of games
- I play about 30-40 games per year, of a wide range of genres, platforms and ages
- If you want a more specific sense of games/series I enjoy: Monster Hunter, Pokémon, Yakuza, Mass Effect, Rez, Disco Elysium, Shadow of the Colossus, Clash Royale, A-Train, Super Smash TV, Virtua Fighter 5, Earth Defence Force, Rhythm Tengoku, Metal Gear Solid, SimCity, Hearthstone, Civilization, Advance Wars, Tabe Kaeru, Desert Golfing, Grand Theft Auto, Marvel Snap, Street Fighter, Destiny, 80 Days, Action Half-Life, Team Fortress, Vesper.5, most Nintendo games, anything by Bullfrog, the Bitmap Brothers, the early years of PlatinumGames, 90’s SquareSoft titles, and just about any game with a co-op mode
- I also play a lot of boardgames and tabletop games, as well as some CCGs and RPGs – if you’re working on any licenced Games Workshop title, I am probably familiar with the setting already
- Some amount of programming knowledge
- My programming skills are self-taught and very rudimentary, but I have some prior experience with Basic, Python, C#, VBA, and scripting languages for various OS platforms