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Tools Portfolio
These tools exist to serve gameplay quality, iteration speed, and player experience.
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Toolkits
A unified in-editor hub for tool discoverability, reusable patterns, and standardized workflows.
Problem:
As the studio grew, teams created tools without a shared framework or discovery layer. Designers lost time hunting through menus and documentation, and tool knowledge became fragmented and inconsistent across teams.
Solution:
I designed and built a centralized, dockable editor framework in Unreal Engine 5 that unified tools, assets, templates, and documentation into a single always-available interface with consistent UX patterns and reusable modules.
The framework enabled users to:
- Instantly discover and launch tools without searching menus or documentation
- Search and filter props, meshes, blueprints, and templates by keyword
- Customize toolsets per user, with persistent settings across sessions
- Access usage guidance, tunables, and examples directly in-engine
- Create reusable scene templates while preserving actor relationships
Instrumentation:
Built-in diagnostics + usage analytics to track adoption, identify friction, and guide iteration. Toolkits also included direct feedback hooks, allowing users to report issues or request new tools without leaving the editor.
Impact:
- Reduced search, setup, and documentation overhead through centralized discovery and guidance (saving designers ~10–20 minutes per task across dozens of daily workflows).
- Standardized tooling patterns, making tools easier to learn and maintain across teams
- Enabled rapid expansion—new toolkits could be created outside the original scope with minimal friction
- Improved onboarding and cross-team consistency, reducing ramp-up time for new designers to days rather than weeks in most cases
- Shifted culture toward shared infrastructure, raising baseline quality and repeatability
Team Test Arena
A modular integration testbed for validating interconnected gameplay systems in-engine.
Problem:
As the project scaled, teams validated features in isolated spaces with no shared framework for reuse. Test levels became cluttered, targeted tests slowed down, and overlapping systems were often validated independently—making integration issues harder to detect and more expensive to fix later.
Solution:
I designed and built a centralized Team Test Arena in Unreal: a modular framework where reusable test modules could be composed, toggled, and evaluated dynamically—so teams could build a scenario once, then recombine modules to validate interactions across combat, encounters, and systems.
The framework enabled users to:
- Assemble modular test environments tailored to specific features or systems
- Toggle test modules on/off locally without affecting shared content
- Convert existing test maps into reusable modules with minimal setup
- Rapidly spawn enemies, encounters, and layouts for targeted validation
- Temporarily inject test modules into live levels for real-world evaluation
- Create lightweight, reusable debug buttons and hotkeys without complex blueprints
Instrumentation:
Built-in diagnostics + usage analytics to track adoption, identify friction, and guide iteration.
Impact:
- Improved integration testing velocity across Design, QA, and leadership reviews
- Reduced cross-system integration defects by validating systems together earlier
- Established a shared test “source of truth” for core gameplay systems
- Enabled cross-team reuse of test scenarios, eliminating redundant test map creation across multiple teams
- Raised puzzle and encounter quality, by making targeted validation cheap and repeatable
Narrative Previs Tool
A designer-facing tool for blocking, pacing, and validating narrative moments directly in gameplay.
Problem:
Our unannounced AAA project was highly cinematic, with NPCs and IGCs appearing in nearly every level. Narrative changes frequently landed after levels had already progressed, forcing level designers to revisit completed spaces to accommodate new blocking, timing, or spatial needs. This back-and-forth was time consuming, slowed iteration, and made it difficult to evaluate narrative pacing and player focus until late in production.
Solution:
I designed and built a lightweight previs tool that allowed level designers to block and prototype narrative moments directly inside their levels. Designers could place characters, define movement paths, and deliver dialogue to quickly establish pacing, spatial requirements, and player attention without waiting on final narrative implementation.
The tool used the same underlying gameplay and narrative systems as production content, allowing previs setups to be easily converted into final narrative moments once the narrative team was ready. Support for full-audio or text-based dialogue enabled designers to fully communicate intent and timing even before recorded audio existed, allowing meaningful iteration and validation to happen earlier and more independently across teams. This shifted narrative previs from a late-stage dependency into an early, designer-driven validation step in the pipeline.
The tool enabled teams to:
- Block and iterate on narrative moments early to validate pacing and spatial needs
- Rapidly prototype cinematic sequences using real gameplay systems
- Test dialogue timing and player focus before final audio was available
- Reduce repeated rework caused by late narrative changes
- Communicate narrative intent through playable previs instead of documentation
Instrumentation:
Built-in diagnostics + usage analytics to track adoption, identify friction, and guide iteration.
Impact:
- Enabled narrative and level design to iterate asynchronously, reducing cross-team blocking (often collapsing multi-day back-and-forth into same-day previs passes)
- Validated pacing, staging, and player focus earlier, lowering late-stage rework
- Improved clarity of narrative beats, catching slow sections or overload earlier
- Strengthened level designer knowledge of narrative timing and staging
- Reduced dependency on narrative designers and final audio implementation for meaningful iteration
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Metrics Tool
A designer-facing validation system for gameplay metrics, tuning, and spatial setup.
Problem:
Gameplay metrics lived primarily in documentation, forcing frequent context switching to verify distances, timings, and setup requirements. Validating complex systems in-level was slow and error-prone, leading to inconsistent setups and longer iteration cycles.
Solution:
I designed and built a lightweight Metrics Tool that could be dropped into any level, allowing designers to visualize, measure, and validate gameplay metrics directly in-world. The tool pulled live values from tuning data, ensuring measurements always reflected current gameplay settings. Designers could select any metric, actively measure distances or relationships in the environment, and receive immediate visual feedback indicating whether values were within spec — with guidance on how to fix them.
By embedding metrics directly into the editor experience, the tool eliminated reliance on external documentation and turned abstract tuning requirements into actionable, spatial feedback during moment-to-moment development.
The system enabled teams to:
- Visualize gameplay metrics directly in levels using live tuning data
- Measure distances and relationships interactively during layout and encounter setup
- Instantly validate whether spaces met documented requirements
- Identify out-of-spec setups early and correct them before implementation bugs surfaced
- Rapidly iterate on gameplay spaces without repeated back-and-forth to documentation
Instrumentation:
Built-in diagnostics + usage analytics to track adoption, identify friction, and guide iteration.
Impact:
- Improved early iteration accuracy, reducing downstream bugs
- Reduced revision passes for combat, traversal, and stealth setups through in-world validation (typically cutting 2–3 iteration cycles per encounter)
- Accelerated level setup and tuning workflows across design teams
- Reduced reliance on external documentation, keeping designers in the editor for the majority of tuning workflows
- Improved gameplay consistency through shared, enforceable metrics standards
Templates Tool
A designer-driven system for capturing setups, preserving intent, and accelerating encounter iteration.
Problem:
Designers were repeatedly rebuilding the same combat and stealth setups from scratch. While individual elements could be placed quickly, the connections between actors, logic, and instance tuning had to be recreated every time. When strong combinations emerged that teams wanted to reuse, designers had to route requests through the tools team to make those configurations reusable. This slowed iteration, limited experimentation, and kept valuable setup knowledge fragmented across individuals.
Solution:
I designed and built a Templates Tool that allowed designers to select any group of actors and convert them into reusable templates with a single action—preserving connections, tuning, and spatial relationships. This enabled complete encounter setups to be dropped anywhere exactly as authored. Designers could name, categorize, and annotate templates directly in-editor, making intent and usage guidance immediately discoverable without relying on external documentation.
This shifted templates from static assets into shared, living knowledge — empowering designers to capture successful patterns, reuse them across levels, and continuously evolve best practices without dependency on the tools team.
The system enabled teams to:
- Convert existing encounters into reusable templates with one click
- Preserve full actor relationships and tuning across placements
- Organize, filter, and discover templates directly in the editor
- Embed usage guidance so intent traveled with the setup
- Rapidly bootstrap new encounters using proven configurations
Instrumentation:
Built-in diagnostics + usage analytics to track adoption, identify friction, guide iteration, and surface high-value templates.
Impact:
- Faster encounter bootstrap by reusing proven setups as building blocks (turning hours of setup into minutes for common encounter patterns).
- Improved knowledge sharing, turning successful patterns into studio-wide assets
- Reduced dependence on the tools team, enabling designers to evolve best practices independently
- Reduced setup errors, by reusing validated configurations
- Accelerated spread of learnings, making iteration improvements compound over time
Automated Animation Metrics Testing
Automated regression testing for combat animations to enforce timing, alignment, and feel at scale.
Problem:
Asgard’s Wrath 2 relied on large, modular animation sets to support designer-driven combo creation and ability mixing across dozens of enemies. While this flexibility empowered rapid design iteration, it made validation extremely difficult—small timing or positioning variances could slip through unnoticed.
In VR, hitting precise animation metrics was critical for player muscle memory and combat feel. Manual scrubbing through hundreds of animations to verify speed, hit timing, and follow-through was slow, error-prone, and didn’t scale as content grew.
In VR, hitting precise animation metrics was critical for player muscle memory and combat feel. Manual scrubbing through hundreds of animations to verify speed, hit timing, and follow-through was slow, error-prone, and didn’t scale as content grew.
Solution:
I designed and built an automated animation testing framework that ran characters through their full animation libraries and validated each clip against combat metrics — including speed, impact timing, target alignment, and follow-through.
The system generated pass/fail reports with actionable feedback, allowing animators and designers to quickly identify and fix issues without manual review. Designers could continue building new combos and behaviors, while animators validated changes through automated runs instead of hand-testing individual clips.
Once in place, the framework became a core part of the combat pipeline—enabling rapid iteration while maintaining consistent quality across thousands of animations.
- Automatically validate combat animations against gameplay metrics
- Rapidly identify timing and positioning issues via generated reports
- Iterate on combos and abilities without blocking animation polish
- Ensure consistent player feedback and muscle memory in VR combat
- Scale animation validation across large enemy libraries
Instrumentation:
Built-in diagnostics + usage analytics to track adoption, identify friction, and guide iteration.
Impact:
- Accelerated animation iteration cycles by replacing manual review with automated validation
- Reduced metrics-related bugs to near zero across combat animations
- Enabled rapid issue diagnosis through clear, actionable test reports
- Scaled validation to thousands of animations without user oversight
- Delivered higher-quality combat feel and combo consistency through enforced timing standards