Dungeons & Dragons Online (Live Updates)

DDO_live_cover

My Roles:

  • Lead Designer
  • Lead Content Designer
  • Senior Designer

Skills Used:

  • Team Leadership & Management
  • Free-to-play Design
  • Content Design
  • Systems Design
  • Scripting
  • Writing
  • Press/Community Interaction

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(Images taken from ddo.com, ddowiki.com, and tentonhammer.com)

Achievement Highlights:

  • Led design team to successfully release 24 updates over 6 years – an aggressive cadence of one update every 3 months. These updates were profitable and well-received by the fan-base, all while keeping a reasonable work-life balance for team-members.
  • Successful free-to-play designs leading to ongoing profits.
  • Prototyped innovative new types of content, such as the Haunted Halls of Eveningstar, leading to players returning year after year.

Tools:

  • Proprietary Turbine level editor
  • Hansoft
  • TestTrack Pro

Platforms:

  • PC
  • Mac

Genre:  Free-to-Play MMORPG Live Updates

Game Download Website: https://www.ddo.com/en

From 2009 to 2014, the free-to-play MMO Dungeons & Dragons Online released 24 separate Live Updates. Each one varied in size, but typically consisted of 4-6 new quests, 2 new class trees or major systems feature, a festival event, new loot, and new/improved MTX offerings.

I worked on all 24 updates. I was Lead Designer for most of them, leading either the content team or the entire design team. I interviewed and approved design hires, gave design direction & iteration feedback, and provided mentorship. For many of these updates, I also drove initial planning and licensing proposals.

My scheduling/production responsibilities included creating schedules, pipelines, and processes for my teams. At times this involved some scheduling for the art team, where we needed to synchronize dependencies in our deliverables. I led my teams to consistently deliver high quality work at an average release pace of one update every 3 months, over the course of 6 and a half years. I am particularly proud that my planning and scheduling led to the design team achieving this while keeping a reasonable work-life balance.

I worked on too many features to individually list them. But my proudest content achievement is the quest “Haunted Halls of Eveningstar” inspired by Ed Greenwood’s original paper module. It’s considered to be one of DDO’s best dungeons by the fan base.

Over the course of DDO’s 24 live updates, here are some of the other features I directly implemented/designed: