My name is Alek, and I’ve been a game designer for almost ten years now. Below is a list of projects I have been professionally involved with, as well as a sampling of some of my student work.
Battlefield (unreleased)
I worked on the single player campaign of the next Battlefield game for about two years right at the beginning of its development. I got to participate in laying the foundation of the campaign while developing tools and workflows to deliver an innovative Battlefield experience that had not been attempted previously.
Halo Infinite
I joined 343 Industries to work on Halo Infinite as a Narrative Technical Designer for the last two and a half years of its development. Among many other duties, I was responsible for Lua scripting to trigger and manipulate narrative moments in the game such as characters talking, cutscenes playing, and other game logic under the hood.
The Narrative Tech team within 343 was small and agile, with most of us having our fingerprints all over the entire campaign. Whenever anything happens in the campaign that isn’t combat, our team made it happen.
This is a no-commentary playthrough of one of the missions I spent the most time working on. It was heavily featured at an E3 demo, so it had a lot of eyes on it. In this mission, one of my many jobs was to reconcile linear narrative continuity with non-linear gameplay objectives. Three different cutscenes can play in three different locations depending on how you play the mission. Making sure that lines of dialogue make sense and have good timing regardless of where they are triggered from was also important in a large sandbox mission like this.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker - Special Episode
In late 2018, I joined Nintendo Software Technology in Redmond as a level design contractor to help close out the end of the development cycle for Captain Toad downloadable content on the Nintendo Switch. In a few short months, I was able to learn the proprietary internal editing tools at Nintendo and assume responsibility for two stages in the final product.
I was also able to assist in bug squashing and other adjustments on levels throughout the DLC, as well as other production tasks like assembling PR materials and interfacing long distance with the team in Japan.
These were the two levels I was responsible for adding to the DLC for Captain Toad. The first was a bonus level that appears between stages while you’re playing. I was tasked with making it as a low-impact way to learn the tools, and I was able to get a version up and running within my first week on the job. After that, I was tasked with making one of the last stages in the DLC, meant to be one of the more challenging levels in the game. The design goal was to combine the two main new mechanics from our DLC, the crown chips and the ghost hunting, into a single level. This one was a really fun design challenge and it went through a lot of different iterations before I landed on the final result.
DigiPen Instutute of Technology Student Projects (2011-2015)
I graduated from DigiPen Institute of Technology in 2015 with a BA in Game Design. During my time at DigiPen, I gained experience working with small teams of programmers, designers, and artists to create great projects. I also made a number of games on my own in a solo capacity.
