Creating highly engaging, methodical melee combat in first-person was challenging; so much, in fact, that much of the team was skeptical at the prospect.

Through prototyping, a rapid iteration cycle, and thorough research of our emulation targets, I arrived at an interconnected system of different resources that the player needs to manage and exchange during combat.

Players are incentivized to play aggressively, in spite of how dangerous our enemies are, because rapid execution of parry and attack actions will supercharge the player's sword and reward them with an explosive finisher.

This paired well with the work done by our AI designer, and satisfied even very experienced action and fighting game players.

Remanence, due to team priorities and scope constraints, is a very narrative-light game. However, as the team's sole narrative designer, I worked with the director of our art team to write a "worldbuilding bible" that fulfilled the artists' needs in contextualizing Remanence's environments, enemies, VFX, and UI, in addition to narrative documentation that gave the level team a story arc that they could spatialize.

I prototyped environmental storytelling vignettes with our level designers and environment artists, and worked to preserve tonal & narrative consistency as the project went through major design iterations.

I wrote our team's researching and playtesting parameters, gathering weekly data per specific goals set by key members of the team:

What specific features or revisions need testing? What do we need to consider when comparing this week's feedback to last week's? How can we leverage different research methods to get the best data possible and preserve internal validity?

These and more were questions I was asking on a daily basis. When the quality of our user research improved, the quality of our other design iterations improved.

Over the course of development, ToSoftware had multiple contributors rotate in and out: workflow and communication problems were both a cause for that, and an inevitable result.

Nevertheless, I worked closely with both of my producers to help mediate conflicts as they arose, facilitate communication, and develop interdisciplinary empathy and rapport.