It sure has been a while since I’ve updated this website, let alone this blog. There’s a few reasons for that, some of which I can get into, others not so much.
Still, in the interest of maintaining a consistent record of what’s been going on in my life, here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve been up to.
Work
I’ve been consistently working as a Game Designer at Ubisoft since 2020, the majority of that being on Siege. For the last few years, I really came into my own while working on the game’s operators. I can honestly say it’s been a blast working on them, and I’m genuinely proud of what I’ve accomplished in that respect. Knowing that ops like Ram and Deimos remain consistently meta picks, while Skopos, Rauora, and Denari have all been pretty well received as interesting additions to the game, I consider to be proof of my progress as a designer. Then, there’s the fact that I got the privilege of designing Solid Snake for Siege. I’ve been a massive Metal Gear Solid fan for a long time, so that particular mandate was more special to me than I can really convey.
My time as an Operator Designer on Siege is coming to an end soon. I’ll be going out with a pretty big bang in Y12S1, but internally, I’ve already mostly moved into my new role. Ops are in very good hands; I have a lot of faith in what Vincent, Marc-Antoine, Dominick, and the entire Ops Cell can do. I also made a point to leave the cell with more resources and structure than I joined it with, and it’s not like I’m all that far away either. There’s still stuff I wish I got to do there, but all in all, I leave that stage with very few regrets.
I’ve already been hard at work on my new mandate as a Core Gameplay Designer for the last month and a half. Core Gameplay may sound like a vague term, and it is, but essentially, it means I’m working on various gameplay-related topics that aren’t operators, maps, or balancing. That includes more systemic stuff like movement and navigation, game modes, miscellaneous quality of life fixes, new gameplay features… It covers a lot. For the time being, I’m focusing on a couple major features. One is the half reinforcement test that was announced for Y11S4. The other one is still secret, but I know for a fact that it’ll be a big hit when it gets revealed.
There’s loads I’d love to say more about my work. I hoped to use my platform, including my growing presence within the community, as a way to build bridges with the community and give people a glimpse into what it means to design in a AAA studio. Unfortunately, Ubi and I don’t always align on what is a good amount of transparency, and that’s led to me pulling back a bit on that particular side of things. It’s not as though Ubisoft’s perspective is wrong; it’s just a different approach, and as their employee I have to respect that. Still, I am glad to see that they’ve taken some steps in building more connections to the community, at least on Siege. It might be total arrogance on my part, but I’d like to think I had a tiny bit of influence on that.
Maybe someday I’ll be able to talk more about all the interesting aspects of how games are made, from the unexpected constraints one has to navigate, to how to give and receive feedback, to the complexities of balancing narrative and gameplay, to the differences between indie, mobile, and AAA. I have a lot of topics in my drafts. But for now, I’ve got other things to focus on, so I’ll keep those writings on the backburner.
It’s not like I’m completely silent either. I still have my Twitter and Bluesky accounts. I’m just not posting about Siege as much on them.
Personal Life
The last few years have been absolutely massive in terms of my personal life. I reached my 30s. I met the love of my life and got married. I moved twice. I developed some pretty bad back problems. My mom and my uncle got and beat cancer. I travelled to Manitoba, Munich, and Paris. And perhaps most significantly, I have a son now.
Samuel’s a little 101 day old goober as I write this, cute as a button. I love him more than the entire world. He’s wrecked our sleep and life schedules, but honestly not nearly as much as I expected him to. Maybe that’s because my sleep cycles were already absolute nonsense. Either way, I’m just glad he’s been as easy as he has been so far.
I really can’t wait for him to become old enough to have his own thoughts that go beyond food and poop. I’m eager to see what kind of person he’ll become, and to find out how I can help to guide him to be the best version of himself that he can be. Perhaps it’s my mindset as a designer talking, but the prospect of raising a child into whatever he decides he wants to become, and finding out what that is, is very exciting to me.
TTRPGs
Until a couple years ago, I was still spending a lot of my free time on TTRPGs, but that’s shifted a bit in the last while. The D&D, Pathfinder, and Starfinder games I was playing in and running all pretty much collapsed into indefinite hiatuses. I still haven’t given up on finishing Hell’s Vengeance, but I’ll probably need to find some way to wrap it up with a one shot final battle or something. I’m also very sad about the fact that one of those campaigns was going to be my chance to introduce Steph to playing Pathfinder with me, and that game collapsing coincided with one of my dear friends and favourite players leaving the hobby on sad terms, but these things happen I suppose.
My hunger for it is still very much there, but Sam being tossed into the mix has kinda put a big pause on any efforts there. To pass what little free time I have in between, I started writing profiles of my various original characters. I made a document and a sheet for all of my characters across my various roleplaying endeavours, and then more recently, I’ve been working on another document and sheet for all of my Pathfinder adventure path characters. It’s been a fun little side activity, and it’s allowed me to keep my roleplaying and worldbuilding skills sharp. When the time comes, I’d like to think I’ll be able to get back into the swing of things. Even better if I can bring Steph and Sam into the mix one day.
There’s also FateWeaver, the system I was working on separately as my own project. I actually picked it back up recently after a fairly long break, and decided to completely rewrite my core rulebook with a few key changes to make the rules more digestible, and also to streamline a few things that always bugged me about it. That whole project is still going on in the background, though as with the other games, I’m not expecting it to translate into actual game time anytime soon.
Other Games
It’s funny to think that as I’ve grown more and more as a game designer, the less and less time I have to actually play games. Still, that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. I finished The Witcher III with all of it’s DLCs (minus the one that was just announced a week or so ago, of course), I replayed and beat the remasters of the original Mass Effect trilogy and Metal Gear Solid 3, I beat R6 Vegas 2, I fully completely Expedition 33, and I’m 2/3rds of the way through Baldur’s Gate 3. Hunh, lots of 3s in my library it seems.
I could probably write full blown articles on each of these, but for now I’ll just surmise and say these are all fantastic games.
I’ve also been continuing my work on my Minecraft creative world, and of course I’ve still been playing Siege when I can. Then there’s all the games I watch on Stream, so it’s not as though I’ve been out of the loop. Still, I can definitely tell that’s it’s taken a backseat to everything else these days.
Conclusion
So yeah, I’ve been busy. I’ll probably keep being busy for the next several years. It’s meant that writing things like this has become less and less of a priority in my life, but from a personal standpoint, I’d consider that a good thing.
In a time when my view of the world at large has steadily declined, I’m glad that at least my own little pocket within these crazy times still feels like it’s on a positive trend. That’s the part I can control, so that’s what I’ll choose to focus on, and when I do that, I’m hopeful for the future.
I’ll leave you with a meme template I had entirely too much fun with lately.