Alien Syndrome

Design Director - Totally Games

• Supervised design team of 3 on multiple projects and the team as a whole, 25 developers.

• Reviewed levels, design documents, and held level dailies to provide actionable feedback.

• Design document writing for all games.

• Ensure gameplay direction is adhered to and gameplay quality is up to Totally Games standards.

• Research and development for future projects was a constant requirement of the position.

• Implemented design standards and procedures for the design team to increase productivity.

Senior Designer

Strange story with this project. Mostly it was a major miscommunication between Sega and our team. We were working under the assumption that the project would be an arcade style game, reminiscent of the original Alien Syndrome arcade game. Unfortunately, during one of our greenlight meetings, they told us that they wanted an action RPG. We all looked at each other in shocked dismay and then said, ok... let's get to work!

Duties

• Lead the design team and supervised each designer’s levels and mini-games.

• Coordinated level development between the designers and the art and programming teams.

Luckily, the foundation of our level design work could fit the new direction. We just needed to extend the missions to give enough runway for content so the player had plenty of room to gain XP while keeping the difficulty curve relatively stable from our initial arcade pass. 

Also, back then, the Wii was a huge hit and action games were just starting to come on the platform. So we were right in the thick of it.

Above are a pair of developer interviews featuring myself describing the game and how it used the Wii controllers and then a talk about the variety of weapons the player had access to through out their gameplay journey.