Professional Experience:

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2
State of Decay 2

Projects and Work Experience

If you’re a recruiter or studio interested in seeing my work, feel free to reach out through my contact form to receive writing samples.

Eleventh Hour Games, Narrative Manager

(January 2022 – December 2023)

I led Last Epoch’s narrative, level design, and audio departments for story direction, focusing on the main story and it’s overhaul efforts from early access. I oversaw my teams’ schedules for each agile sprint, providing leadership and direction both internally and with vendors working on narrative aspects of the game. I also worked in a design role myself, running writer’s room meetings and creating our writing style guide.

For campaign overhaul, I worked closely with other creative departments to hash out story details, lore, characters, and the game’s setting. To prep the story for launch in 1.0. I was in charge of writing new dialogue and overseeing pre-production for future content —helping implement changes through our internal Unity tools and wikis. I supervised our project’s story beats, narrative documents, and worked to ensure our stakeholders’ requirements met our employees’ creative output.

I was also our primary contact for our outsourced vendors who worked on both our voice acting and cutscenes respectively. I worked closely, overseeing their progress and providing information whenever needed. With voice actors, I worked on sending out casting calls and auditions to insure what talent we hire on—sifting through samples and attending auditions. I then worked with our voice-acting team to assist actors during recording sessions.

A fan took the time to make a “cinematic” version of the first chapter in our game, in which I was in charge of creating the plot beats for and writing some of the scripts.

Check out information on the game’s story here: https://www.lastepoch.com/world-story

Aspyr Media, Game Writer

(Contracted April 2021 – November 2021)

I worked with Aspyr as a writer on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Remake. On this project, I wrote dialogue and quests for portions of the game, collaborating closely with designers to structure how they’re set up and presented. As writers on a remake for a popular title, we worked closely to ensure the game’s original vision stayed true while uplifting it to a modern level. This meant looking carefully and memorizing the original game’s characters, story, and major plot beats in order for us to add more depth, content, narrative mechanics, and more.

Hexagram IO, Senior Narrative Designer

(Contracted March 2021 – June 2021)

I worked on a few contracted projects with Hexagram:

I was the Narrative Lead for the English localization of an oversees AR game, working with a team of writers to get a story written in Arabic into a polished version of the English language. This involved taking text and working closely with the original development team to make sure the English version made sense, felt engaging, and still honored the intentions from the original translation.

I also got to write non-linear dialogue for interactive characters used at the 2020 World’s Fair. On this project, I worked closely with the team in charge of setting up the fair to ensure each character made sense for each exhibit’s purpose. Each exhibit represented a specific theme, and characters were designed to enhance that theme’s experience and provide extra information in an engaging, fun way. Their dialogue had to make sense with the theme and updated depending on the path each attendee walked, providing a non-linear experience.

Hardsuit Labs, Narrative Designer

(August 2019 – March 2021)

I wrote for the Hardsuit Labs version of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. On this project, I focused on developing characters, quests, and structuring reactive dialogue in a writer’s room style. I also attended voiceover sessions, providing direction for my characters, and collaborated closely with other departments to ensure a strong story in our very non-linear, very player-focused roleplaying game.

I was the main narrative point of contact in a “Player Agency” strike team. We mapped out different player approaches for completing quests across the game with other departments, ensuring players could approach quests however they wanted—whether they focused on combat, dialogue, stealth, or any variation of the three. Our efforts mostly dealt with main story quests, though we occasionally approached efforts to ensure agency on side quests and “micro” quests on the game.

I worked on a few key areas throughout the main story, including the final act of the game. There, we worked to ensure all the variables from across player’s choices (in which, there were many) were accounted for while providing reactive consequences. I also designed and wrote dialogue for main characters, side characters, and even developed a romance route for a major character.

During my time at Hardsuit Labs, I also worked on pre-production for an unannounced title. On this project, I helped conceptualize an original IP, developing it’s major story pillars and setting up a story bible.

Amazon Games Studios, Quality Assurance Lead

(Contracted June 2018 – August 2019)

I led teams throughout various projects, focusing on embedded QA. I managed their schedules, led 1:1s and meetings, and worked closely with our directors and points of contact from other departments to ensure work was done on time with the correct test cases and needed help. This meant I was either the one creating the correct testing documents on TestRail, or overseeing another Quality Assurance coworker to ensure they do.

I was also brought on for a period of time onto the Twitch Prime Gaming team to help re-establish and setup their Quality Assistance processes. While going through a major overhaul with departments internally, they needed someone to setup JIRA, new internal tools, and the QA department’s structure to ensure that it was ready to hire on a new team. I worked closely with the QA Director on this, ensuring everything was ready for the department to get started.

For two canceled projects, I was given the chance to dual narrative design work alongside my QA Lead responsibilities. Of course, my primary focus was on completing QA tasks, but I also managed to work on developing the narrative structure for one project, as well as another’s story, world, and quest structure. This was mostly done due to the early access and development stages of both games—specifically for the second project, I was setup to transition from QA Lead into Narrative Designer if the project had not been canceled. While I was the QA Lead in both projects’ early development, I worked with senior QA to build our testing processes and JIRA databases to work efficiently.

Experis Game Solutions, Quality Assurance Analyst

(Contracted March 2017-June 2018)

I worked as a contracted tester for projects at Xbox Game Studios, which was called Microsoft Studios at the time. I focused on training new coworkers on best QA practices and how to work as embedded QA with different departments, especially while working remotely with a development team. Studios I had the chance to work with through Microsoft were Undead Labs and Sumo Digital, among others.

While there, I created a “player experience” report that helped a project track user engagement and use their opinions into data for Microsoft. Creating surveys and working closely with the User Research team, I was personally able to pitch the importance of these reports to higher-ups at Microsoft’s gaming department. With positive reception, I was given the ability to work alongside User Research as well as developers over in User Experience to flesh out the fundamentals of what makes a game enjoyable, what sort of questions to ask, how to ask them, and specifically how to turn that into data for teams to review. To my delight, Microsoft was able to standardize the report structure and made it available across various projects being developed at the time.

Other Projects

Convention Speaker

While working in the video games industry, I’ve taken part in being an invited speaker for conventions. My focus has been on narrative design as a field and the intricacies of working in the video games industry.

Conventions I’ve spoken at include:

Convention Exhibit Assistance

At my time in the video game industry, I’ve worked professionally to assist booths and talent on the show floor. This includes experience working with game studios I work for to represent ourselves at gaming events, as well as personal experience working with friends who are brought on as talent (e.g. voice acting talent) to assist them with their autographs booth, their schedule, and financial management to ensure it gets delivered to their agent.

Pixel Art Game Education, Narrative Classroom Designer

(September 2016 – May 2017)

I worked alongside a classroom design team in creating the class’s Narrative Design curriculum, using Twine and Final Draft to build a curriculum about markup, non-linear branching, and script-writing. We then taught teachers in our program the curriculum to utilize throughout their classes for students aged K-12. I also taught students myself, showing them how to build games through accessible and more complex game engines, such as Unreal and Unity.

Fallout: Miami, Game Writer

(November 2018 – June 2019)

Fallout 4 Mod

While working in Quality Assurance and looking to transfer into the narrative design field, I worked on writing for mods and other projects, such as the large fan-made game, Fallout Miami. As a writer on this Fallout 4 mod, I wrote designed quests, wrote companions and other characters, and fleshed out lore specifics to their world’s setting. I also helped flesh out the technical aspects of non-linear variables in their game, ensuring they functioned correctly and provided a smooth and entertaining experience.

Game Design Degree

Bachelor of Science Degree, Game Design

(Graduated August 5th, 2016, Full Sail University)

Upon graduating, I was named my graduating class’s Salutatorian and Advanced Achievement Award winner, which are deemed some of the most honorable awards for the school’s degree program. Professors also rewarded me with Course Director awards for Writing, Game Design, and Leadership.

Full Sail University’s Game Design B.S. program allows students to focus on level design, gameplay mechanics, useful programming languages, documentation and collaboration with fellow game developers and artists. I spent my time there in their online program, allowing me to work remotely with teachers and students from my town in Portland, Oregon.

During my time at Full Sail University, I worked on a variety of portfolio projects. I also worked alongside the Portland Indie Game Squad for game jams. In these roles, I took on the role of a game designer and writer, fleshing out the narrative and mechanics of various puzzle, platformer and story-driven games.