An author's introduction to my Gamasutra weblog.
Hello all,
I'll be keeping a blog here partly as a place to share my opinions about all things game-related, as well as to allow prospective clients to find out more information about who I am and what I do.
My primary role is contract game design. I come up with ideas for games and put them into pitch documents (if they are being pitched to a publisher) or concept/design documents (if they are being self-funded). I also do on-site game design work during project development. In addition, I take on various other roles as needed, providing clients with writing and proofreading services, strategic advice, concept and milestone evaluation, and much more.
I work primarily with independent developers, but occasionally a publisher hires me for evaluation or firefighting duty on one of their titles.
I've worked in a game design role for 7 years. I have lead designer experience on a sports game, plus credits on many other titles across a wide variety of genres and console platforms. The bulk of my work nowadays is on XBLA and PSN games, although I also do a decent amount of work on the Wii and DS.
My areas of expertise are:
Understanding how a player (or potential customer) thinks and reacts
Systems design, tuning and balancing. I'm a numbers guy.
Knowledge of existing games. I play and analyze all the big stuff and a great deal of the little stuff.
My areas of interest are:
MMOs and other online games with an element of persistence. These games are all exercises in player motivation, which makes them ideal projects for me.
Indy games. Not so much their weird experimental nature, but their small teams and focused designs
Twitch action games. There's just something zen about games of pure reflex.
Procedural content generation. Not Spore-style visual-only, but stuff that actually keeps gameplay fresh.
Strategy games. Although I never work on PC titles, I'm a long time PC (and board/card) gamer, and strategy games (Warlords, Civ, HoMM, Castles, etc.) were the bread and butter of the platform during my formative years.
Since almost all my design work is confidential, you'll have to get a sense of my design tastes, tendencies, and biases by reading my Gamasutra articles and, hopefully, future blog posts:
Rethinking the MMO (March 2007)
Stories from the Sandbox (Feb. 2008)
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