Game designer Introduction
Hi!
I'm one of the live balance designers, and I'd like to introduce myself and give some background on some of the things I've done.
I designed my first game when I was about 10; I took Gabriel's Point Blank and made a new set of rules for it. The new version was more chess-like than the original, but it didn't work very well and tended to get bogged down on the small board. I maintained an interest in both boardgames and video games over the years. Around 1992 I designed a huge 8-hour space boardgame. It was fun, but proved too expensive to produce.
I studied physics in college, and went as far as a Master's degree specialized in astrophysics. After 6 months of being a programmer at a hydraulics lab in Iowa City, I landed a job as a game programmer/designer at a new media firm in the UK. I worked there for about 1.5 years, and designed and developed about 15 different original games and ported several of those to a lot of weird platforms (OpenTV, Bush Internet Box...). After 4 years in the UK working on various projects at three different companies (there was a contraction in UK game dev at the time, and these all folded), I moved to Montreal and Ubisoft.
At Ubi I worked on a variety of projects. Most notably gameplay programming for Splinter Cell: Essentials, some exotic gameplay prototypes for Assassin's Creed III (the board game in it was from one of my protos), and gameplay programming and design for My Word Coach for Nintendo DS. I was able to create one iPhone title for Ubi doing the design, programming and art direction around 2010: Crystal Shuffle. Around this time, one of my board game designs, Linkage was published. It's a 10-minute abstract with just a few rules.
After leaving Ubi, I worked on various other projects at other studios, which included Tiny Brains and the iPad version of Pandemic the board game. Eventually I landed at Behaviour where again I worked on a lot of different projects (including Pro Feel Golf... I did the multiplayer network handling for its asynchronous multiplayer mode), working my way from Senior Programmer up to Lead Programmer. Behaviour is very supportive of personal projects, and so I was able to release another mobile game in 2015, Cognizer. A Steam release followed in 2017. It's entirely free to play with no features locked behind IAP or ads of any kind.
After several years there, I was given the opportunity to move into game design full time. This soon led to Dead by Daylight and live balance design where I am now. I'm really having a good time working on this project, as it's very much the kind of game I like to play: hardcore, competitive and multiplayer. I look forward to working on it in the future, and will continue to engage with the community through the forum when possible.
Comments
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Very cool! What was it like working for such a big company like Ubisoft? Was it cold, corporate culture, or was it more relaxed? How was the work-life balance compared to working at BHVR?
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Nice
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I worked with a lot of really talented people at Ubi. My experience there was good; I stayed for 6 years.
One funny thing happened related to working at such a big company. Someone at one of their offices in India got married, and sent an announcement to the mailing list "Ubisoft - World - Production". Well, that meant anyone in production, so that included all artists, programmers, team leads, QA, QC, etc. It pretty much only excluded accounting, marketing, and stuff like that. Probably 5,000 people got that mail!
I was nice and just sent a note back of congratulations. :) I bet she got a flood of email that day. :D
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Very impressive. Never would of guessed someone at BHVR worked with Ubisoft, and that's just one person, wonder what the rest of the dev team have done in the past before BHVR.
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💗🐷❤️🐽💖🐷💕
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Okay, you know a lot about coding so it makes me curious since I'm really interested in following your foot steps.
What degree did you need to become a game programmer / game designer? 😁🤗
Currently, I know Javascript and HTML. I took AP Computer Science a while ago and passed it with ease.
Am I going in the right direction?
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How did you find your way around the Montreal airport that is what I wanna know I got lost so bad I thought I was gonna have to set up camp and live there lol.
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My recommendation is to make something. I had published 4 Mac shareware titles in the late 90s, so when I sent out my first application to a game company in the UK, I could already show that I knew how to start, manage and complete a project on my own.
The education always helps, as it broadens your skill set and your ability to acquire new skills.
This is of course just my opinion, and with regard to starting a career I also recommend getting many different peoples' recommendations and see what feels right for you. :)
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Very cool story, seeing something like this makes me realize that(little did I know at the time) BHVR was actually a surprisingly big pillar of my childhood. They made Scooby Doo! Mystery Mayhem and it's arguably the best one. That or a Night of 100 Frights.
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I made a few games before using Javascript, take a look: (The ending is kinda buggy but everything was in a timed environment).
I plan on getting a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science since making games is really what gives me joy in life. ❤🤗
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Quite an impressive resume. I'm not familiar with many of the games you have had a hand in creating, aside from splinter cell, but I'm sure many of us fansr appreciate the opportunity to speak with and pick the mind of one of the balance designers.
As someone whose been a fan of this game~to varying degrees, I have a question or two, some along the lines of which I'm sure you were expecting to be presented with at some point when creating this thread.
I first want to ask, what was the reason you chose to adjust both nurse's add-ons and her base kit?
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DC's are ruining this game, please do something?
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I say we got about 5 more minutes of civil and polite discussions before a legion main comes in here and starts just exploding.
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God. The game is now broken and thrown out. Please adjust the player back!
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This was handled by someone else on the design team. But the main thing we wanted to do was A) make the addons more interesting and varied and B) give Survivors some space if they managed to avoid a double blink attack.
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Have you ever been tempted to see someone complaining to buff something, and someone complaining to nerf something, and thought about just agreeing with both publicly and very clearly, just to see what happens?
Like if they say nerf freddy and buff freddy and you just go to both of them like "Yes, that totally makes sense we should do that" and then just watch what happens.
Just be like: https://youtu.be/P10bC0Bxp20?t=14
⁽ʲᵏ⁾
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I love that you’ve come to introduce yourself :) I like how involved BHVR is in their game and community. It would be cool to see some of you guys in future streams to describe what you worked on and your thoughts!
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This actually feels very nice to read.
I would love to know more about the people behind DBD and their backgrounds, this was an interesting read ^^
Thank you for sharing this with us @Almo <3
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This is pretty cool, so I'll throw my question(s) in to! As a designer, which killer and their power do you conceptually like the most in theory or practice?
Balance wise, which killer and power suprised you the most once players came up with creative ways to use or abuse it (with or without perks)?
Who has been your favorite killer/survivor to design to date?
Finally, what is the silliest thing you've gotten to test/balance that you never made it out of testing? (I'll be sad but understand if you can't answer this one!)
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Thanks for sharing <3 I always thought game design was pretty cool! Btw I agree that Piggy is the best ;)
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Wow, so now we know the leaked lore for the upcoming Almo survivor!
Now for some questions. Which side is harder to balance for, killer or survivor?
Which killer was the hardest to find a balance for?
Which new chapter was the most fun to balance/create?
Finally, what killer has your favorite Mori? Really curious to all the devs answer to this.
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I like a lot of the Killers, but Myers is one of the best at generating creepiness through his play mechanics. Turning the camera to see him not moving behind something, but staring...
Peoples' creativity with tricky ways to use the updated Freddy are very impressive.
I have not actually done Killer design, as that's handled by the designers who make new content. I work on existing content.
Our prototype Killers often start as the Doctor with a baseball bat and just a flat red texture all over. Seeing that spit little white blobs during the Plague prototyping looked pretty hilarious. :D
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you like developing board games do ya? can someone please convince nintendo to do a fire emblem moba already that isn't a phone lite edition with gachapon gimmicks?! what i wouldn't do for a pvp fire emblem in the style of chinese checkers.
also - nice to meet you.
thanks for the pretty good work so far.
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I actually have a question for you @Almo and you don't have to answer it.
What is it like to work with BHVR and how do you deal with the community on a day to day basis? A community that seems to always has something to say about the game you and BHVR are trying to make.
I know I've had my fair share of complaints on BHVR in the past, the recent update being one of those (although I really enjoy playing as Yui and the Oni, I think they're fantastic). But how do you deal with a community this large and this vocal about every change made to the game they play?
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This is great and all but I must know, did you boop the snoot during development of miss piggy?
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Almo can you talk, to the extent that you're allowed to, on what tools you use to measure balance.
I know that you guys do gather some statistics, like those released.
What are some other stats that you gather?
What motivates you to change a perk, a killer, or a mechanic
Are you open to making major changes to the base kit for all survivors/killers?
What's your favorite food?
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I don't think either Killer or Survivor is harder to balance, but they both present their own challenges. For example, you can come up with some cool Survivor perk, but it's just broken as hell if all four Survivors run it at the same time.
I don't work on new content, so I can't really say which chapter has been the most fun to work on. I will say that adjusting a Killer with a very high annoyance rate but low kill rate was a really interesting challenge (Legion). I took some clues from Riot and how they worked on Darius; he had a 60% ban rate, but 48% win rate.
My favorite Mori is either Huntress for the brutality of that first head shot, or Legion for that evil ankle-drag. shudder
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There's a lot of positivity in the community, and I mainly focus on that. :)
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Most of these are too broad for me to answer concisely. I can't even really say what my favorite food is, I like a lot of different kinds! :D
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I'm very happy to hear that ^^
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It's always interesting to see how often programmers don't start with that as their focus...you going the physics route, a lot of my colleagues went math...makes me wonder if maybe I should've done something other than a CS degree and tried branching out later on down the road!
Question on the coding front, if you don't mind - I played mostly during 2017, and I remember the devs at the time referred to a lot of the underlying code as spaghetti code, using that as an explanation for why at the time they couldn't make the Doctor hallucinations the same skin as the player, among others. Since you work on existing content, I'm assuming you run into working on that code, and I'm curious how you handle that, where one thing could impact something else in a potentially not well-documented way, or collapse something seemingly unrelated. My work is documented to the point I do more documentation than coding specifically to avoid those kinds of situations, so it's really not something I've come across. I'm not planning on being at my current company for my whole career so I figure odds are good I'll run into something less well-documented down the road and if I can be prepared...
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Hey, I didn't intend this to turn into such a huge thread. But thanks for keeping it positive! Gotta hit the sack, see you around in The Fog!
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-tries game cause also wants to code soon lol-
EDIT: game needs some balancing cause its too hard XD But good project though
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It's been a great read. I know I personally have loved having someone around who both participates in the community side of things, as well as gives in depth insight into the thinking of the devs.
Are there any killers/perks that you personally have big ideas for rebalancing that aren't necessarily on the top of the team's list?
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Awww i still wanted to ask the dreadful question:
What would you prefer Myers buff or Pig Buff?
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