Twenty Years of Making Games

I’ve worked on nearly every side of making games: art, level design, game direction, studio leadership, product UX, and running my own studios. Level design is at the heart of it. It’s the most fun, challenging, and rewarding part of game development, where the rubber meets the road.

I started at GarageGames in 2002 as an art intern and spent the startup years as its only full-time artist and designer, covering game art, level design, and the company’s web and marketing design. As the team grew I specialized in interactivity, level design, and art direction, and was design lead on Marble Blast, the franchise I’m still best known for. From 2007 I was game director and then VP of game development, leading the internal team through the launch and live development of Fallen Empire: Legions, ThinkTanks Online, Marble Blast Online, and Rokkitball as the company moved to games as a service.

In 2009 I joined Playdom as an original member of its Eugene studio, which became part of Disney Interactive and grew from 3 people to more than 40. As head of game design I led the team behind Social City, which won the Game Developers Choice Online Award for Best Social Network Game in 2010, and was design lead on Disney’s City Girl, which I talked about at GDC 2013 in “Making a Better Girl Game.” I also did level design on Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics, where every map had to evoke an iconic location from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Who doesn’t want to fight MODOK on the moon?) Disney taught me the value of IP, and to see my designs as part of a larger legacy and an emotional journey for players.

From 2015 to 2017 I was design lead at Sococo, bringing a game designer’s sense of space and presence to tools for distributed teams.

Today I run two studios. At Arcturus Interactive, which I founded in 2018, I’m creative director on Airship Armada, a hex-based tactics RPG, and consult on game design, UX, and monetization. At The Marble Collective I lead design on the Marble It Up! franchise across Switch, PC, Apple Arcade, Xbox, and PlayStation.