Overview

I worked at Intrepid Studios for over 5 and a half years. I initially started on the Systems team, supporting our Alpha 1 launch. But it wasn't long until I gravitated towards the Combat team and found my home. I worked on that team through our Alpha 2 and Steam Early Access launches.

Archetype (Class) Design

I was the design owner of the Bard and Rogue archetypes, both of which were well received by the community for their fun, thematic gameplay and compelling mechanical interactions. I also contributed across the full archetype roster, helping shape early designs and later supporting implementation quality and balance for abilities throughout the game.

Combat Stat Formulas / Overall Balance

I was the primary design owner for all combat stats and many of the game's core stat formulas. I built and maintained the central combat stat spreadsheet, which included attribute-to-waterfall conversion modeling and a full combat calculator used to configure player and NPC builds across gear sets, archetypes, elite ranks, and levels 1-50, with outputs for in-game stats, DPS, and time-to-kill. The system also featured archetype ability analysis, modeling costs, cooldowns, relative power, and burst-versus-efficiency tradeoffs through a chart to identify outliers and balance issues.

Beyond this, I also collaborated closely with the Systems team and owned the balance and implementation of consumable items, item set bonuses, player XP curves, and monster and elite XP rewards, while advising on gear passes and related stat updates.

Technical Design

Dynamic Tooltip System

I architected a feature-rich text parser for dynamic in-game tooltips that could isolate inline keywords and arguments from data and replace them with auto formatted rich text. Supported tooltips for abilities, effects (buffs/debuffs), and items. This enabled developers to build informative, up-to-date, and accurate tooltips through a single source of truth data scheme.

Floating Damage Text System

I took ownership of reworking the damage floater system when it became clear it needed more attention. I built a new, customizable, and optimized floating combat text system, featuring dynamically spaced floaters, relative magnitude sizing, recent floater concatenation, effect application popups, and more punchy animations, overall resulting in better communication of the impactful moments in our combat.

Tools

I built a variety of scripts and tools to support my own and the rest of my teams work over the years. Here are some of the main ones:

Damage Meter

I built an internal damage meter tool to track hit events during combat. It worked similarly to damage meter addons in games like World of Warcraft. The system reported damage, healing, mana gained, DPS, and other combat metrics by instigator and target, and proved invaluable for playtest analysis given the team's limited BI capabilities.

Stat Inspector

I built an internal stat inspector tool that developers could use to inspector any target's stats or owned effects (buffs/debuffs). This tool bypassed normal data replication rules since most of these stats weren't replicated to other clients normally. The tool was used across the team to help debug issues.

Relevant Links

I was featured on a number of livestreams but this was one of the main ones where we revealed the Bard archetype:

Here's my developer page link on the wiki with more links (may be inactive soon as the company is shutting down):