By the time I graduated from high school, I was determined to work in the game industry. I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, which many game developers, including luminaries like Nintendo and Valve, called home. It seemed within reach, though I had no idea how I’d get there.
I continued my education at The Evergreen State College, where I thought the offbeat lack of majors would lend itself well to the mixture of art and programming that goes into making video games. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good fit for me, so I returned home and instead enrolled in a nascent game development program at Bellevue Community College.
While working on my degree, I sent applications to all of the local studios. One happened to be run by the father of a former classmate. Although he hadn’t seen me in years, he recognized my name and invited me to the office for an interview. I can’t recall anything I said during that interview, but I do remember being very nervous as I sat at the head of a table in a conference room responding to questions from a group of programmers, artists, and designers. I had no experience, and everyone seemed to be significantly older than me. Nevertheless, they offered me a temporary position as a game designer on James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing for the Game Boy Advance.
The project’s lead designer taught me the studio’s tools and processes and helped me become a full-fledged member of the team. I designed maps and implemented gameplay in Escher and Epiphany, the studio’s map and script editors. My contract ended when the game passed Nintendo’s Lot Check (certification), but I continued to stop by occasionally, hoping to be the first to hear about any new opportunities.
My persistence was rewarded, and less than a year later, I returned to Griptonite to work on Robots, a Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS title based on the Blue Sky Studios animated film. I built heightmaps in Pro Motion using numbered tiles, which a new tool converted into pseudo-3D backgrounds. This workflow allowed designers to script gameplay while artists painted over the primitive rendered backgrounds.
Meanwhile, most of the 007 team was working on Lego Star Wars: The Video Game for the Game Boy Advance. After we wrapped up Robots, I rejoined them to help finish that title, which was released alongside Revenge of the Sith.
We were excited to get started on a sequel based on the original Star Wars trilogy, but the contract hadn’t been signed yet, so instead we were given the task of pitching a Nintendo DS Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest game. Buena Vista Games (Disney) greenlit projects for the Game Boy Advance, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo DS. I was the sole designer on the Nintendo DS title, which was my first 3D game. I designed the game and camera systems, and I scripted gameplay in Quintessence, the studio’s new 3D editor inspired by Epiphany. It was a whirlwind project that took about a year to complete and secured us a contract for a sequel based on the next movie.
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End entered production immediately after Dead Man’s Chest. We lost some old team members and gained some new ones. This time, I had the opportunity to lead a small group of designers. We built on the foundation of the previous title and pushed the Nintendo DS to the limit.
During that project, Amaze Entertainment, the studio’s parent company, was acquired by Foundation 9 Entertainment. Griptonite was changing, and I was ready for something new. One of my former colleagues was working at ArenaNet and was quite happy there. I’d applied once before, but they’d already filled the position. Now, they had another opening. I applied again, and after a couple of rounds of interviews, I got an offer to join the Guild Wars design team.
ArenaNet announced Guild Wars 2 in PC Gamer the same month I joined the company. The fourth Guild Wars campaign was canceled and replaced by Eye of the North, the first and only expansion. I had about a week to learn the company’s tools. Then, I helped finish the explorable areas and dungeons during the final four months of the project.
Guild Wars 2 wasn’t much more than an idea when we shipped Eye of the North. The design and art teams started working on a prototype of what would eventually become the sequel’s open-world events while the engine and gameplay programming teams worked on substantial upgrades to the graphics, physics, and tools used to build the sequel. The PC Gamer announcement had very optimistically promised a beta in 2008. However, it wasn’t until 2012 that players got to explore the world of Guild Wars 2. During that time, I wore many different hats, most notably leading development of the branching storyline that guided each character through the game.
After Guild Wars 2 launched, the studio started working on a few different updates to keep up with demand from players who’d reached the end-game content. I moved into a product management role on the tools team, where we developed a new system that made it possible to work on those updates simultaneously and rearrange them as necessary. Following that, I had the opportunity to lead a team that built a procedural version of the open-world events and a behavior-tree-based AI that enabled designers to create more complex gameplay that was less error-prone than the more rigid scripting tools available leading up to the original release. Unfortunately, competing priorities at the studio forced us to abandon our future plans, and we were dispersed to other teams.
I joined the World vs. World (large-scale player versus player) team, where we repurposed one of our prototypes for Edge of the Mists, a fast-paced, smaller-scale map where players could compete while they waited in the World vs. World queue. Work had started on the first full-scale expansion for Guild Wars 2. I moved to the Heart of Thorns team early in development, where I designed open-world content and helped orchestrate the beta events leading up to the release. We launched directly into development of the next expansion, Path of Fire, which shipped about two years later.
After we finished Path of Fire, I spent some time working on the Living World team, which released regular updates for the game. I expected to join one of the studio’s new projects in the coming months. However, it was not to be. ArenaNet was struggling to get a few titles going, and NCSoft, the studio’s parent company, decided to cancel most of the new work and reduce staff. I left along with more than a hundred of my colleagues to look for new opportunities.
I found one at Unity, where I joined the Multiplayer Services team. Unity had built a matchmaking solution based on Open Match, a collaboration with Google. I took over as the product manager on the matchmaking service, helped early customers launch multiplayer games like Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond and Fall Guys, and prioritized features for the eventual productization of the matchmaking service. Unity was preparing for an IPO and decided to reorganize the company prior to going public. Organization and management shakeups made the situation untenable, and I left the company after the IPO.
I never imagined my career path would lead me to Facebook, but after leaving Unity, I got an offer for an operations manager position at Oculus Studios. They were acquiring studios at a rapid rate, and it was our team’s responsibility to ensure the studios continued to operate efficiently at Facebook, which was renamed to Meta shortly after I joined the company. Much of our time was spent helping the studios navigate Meta’s procurement process and securing deals for essential services and outsourcing. I handled everything from technical, art, and audio deliverables to a marketing campaign featuring Jane Fonda and Ludacris. It was a significant departure from my previous experience, but I greatly enjoyed working with studios including Downpour Interactive, BigBox VR, Armature Studio, and Supernatural.
Oculus Studios started winding down with the closure of Ready at Dawn in 2024 as budgets were cut, followed by the closures of Armature Studio, Twisted Pixel, and Sanzaru Games in 2026 as part of company-wide restructuring. The remaining studios were significantly downsized, as was the operations team. My position was eventually eliminated later in 2026.
I’m currently seeking new opportunities. If I could be a good fit for your team, please contact me using the form below. I look forward to hearing from you.