The first game Julian Bishop and I created under our Lemon Grove Games tabletop gaming group.
Kaiju Clash is a fast paced, rules-lite wargame for up to 8 people. I built the game to be an introductory game for people new to wargaming, featuring explanations for bread and butter mechanics such as character building, line of sight, and how to place and use terrain. We also designed fold and play paper minis to remove as many barriers to play as possible.
In 2024, Amazon Games undertook a massive project to update and future-proof New World for new and old audiences alike, adding in a massive list of quality-of-life features and additional content, including the game’s first raid.
I was in charge of adapting important narrative boss fights from open world encounters into instanced, single player content. This necessitated reworking our boss encounter logic and marrying our heavily scripted dungeon content to our organic open world narrative encounters.
For Medea, I rebuilt the encounter from the ground up, redesigning the arena to function like our dungeon boss rooms with locking doors and ‘safe zones’ where both the boss and player cannot interact.
These design changes were then adapted to multiple other narrative encounters, making sure to catalogue and document my process for fellow level designers and the cinematics team.
Glacial Tarn is the sister dungeon, and sequel narratively, to Empyrean Forge. Back when I was designing Empyrean Forge, I took on the challenge of designing the dungeon layout to both tease future content and to build within the constraints of an area that would, eventually, double in size.
I always start by thinking about the play spaces architecturally. I value visual legibility and playable navigation above all else, but I also love spaces that have well defined character with logical, narrative details supporting their inclusion. In this case, I designed Glacial Tarn as though it was a runaway coolant system for the massive Emyprean Forge facility. The magically imbued ice water had, for centuries, been left unattended and had chilled the entire facility in nearly indestructible ice.
In order to break through the ice, players would need to find a new power source to fuel their attacks: The Empyrean Flame. Players would find flaming vents throughout the expedition that buff their attacks with fire damage strong enough to remove Ice Blockers from doorways and switches and Ice Armor from enemies. I designed this mechanic to push our status effect systems to new utilities, further opening up our designer toolbox to include more lock-and-key style gameplay features and more interesting encounter types.
Starting in 2022, I joined Amazon Games as a level designer on their MMO project New World.
While there, I designed the 2023 expedition Empyrean Forge, a journey into the Ancient’s lost manufactory within the mountains of Great Cleave.
I took the dungeon from 2D paper maps all the way to shipped product. As level designer, I was responsible for greyboxing play spaces, scripting, placing encounters, and coordinating a multidisciplinary team of artists, designers, and writers to create a cohesive experience that moved the story of New World forward.
One of my major goals when designing the dungeon was adding in an element of ‘hidden information.’ To that end, I designed the Glyph Dial Puzzle, a major feature of the Empyrean Forge.
At dungeon start, the glyph puzzle’s solution is randomly generated, meaning that players cannot brute force the puzzle’s combination lock. Instead, players have to split across the room, seperating into two teams: the code-reader and the lock manipulator. The code reader stands on one platform and is shown a combination of symbols- a combination that they need to give to the player manipulating the lock.
This mechanic is simple in the beginning, but grows in complexity as players are forced to split up and communicate while fending off attacks from fire elementals.
I also was responsible for the design, animation, and scripting of the piston hazards- a new kind of static dungeon hazard that combined our interact system in an novel way to create a looping plug-and-play prefab.
In 2020, I had the privilege of working with the amazing team at Sony Santa Monica as a Collision Designer on God of War: Ragnorok.
During my time there, I helped develop the metrics and design guidelines for The Wolf Sled playspaces, and designed the hazards and ragdoll slides for combat spaces in Midgard, Alfheim, Muslpelheim, and Svartalfheim. I also did the first major gamespace collision passes for those areas while delivering detailed art and design notes to the rest of the team. Since the collision designers were responsible for making sure gameplay spaces remained aligned with our concrete traversal and combat metrics, it was on us to keep both art and design honest with their setups.
Notes included: Making sure the combat space played well without any hitches in the environment (rocks, sharp corners, sight blockers, etc.), traversal was legible and consistent throughout the game, and puzzles were short-circuit proof.
Leading up to the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, I was given the special assignment of designing a Black Ops career portal for longtime players. Players connected their past and present 1st party game accounts to our My Call of Duty system, allowing us to dig deep into their past performance on all Black Ops products. Using this information, a special career highlight video is rendered, customized to your own Black Ops play record. Users could then download or share our this video as a permanent celebration of their Black Ops career.
What I Did: I was lead designer and UX artist for this project, designing a unique look and feel while also integrating and celebrating 10 years of Call of Duty: Black Ops art. We went with a simple, franchise agnostic color scheme for the experience, while also leaning towards Black Ops 4’s cleaner, future focused design.
Though the experience is no longer available, we received record engagement, and many of the videos created through the service can still be found on Youtube and other social media platforms.
Marking one of Activision’s biggest launches ever, Black Ops 4’s multimedia approach to marketing and consumer outreach put newfound responsibilities on the CRM department. Learning from the successes of WWII’s launch, we challenged ourselves to create a suite of templated, weekly communications and unique one-off engagement pieces.
What I Did: Retaining my design, animation, and game capture responsibilities from the previous launch, but with much more freedom to experiment, I tried breaking our traditional template style communications and leaning heavily on in-game UI and texture work. While WWII was marked by it’s serious, historical tone, Black Ops 4 gave us more freedom to explore comedic and light-hearted styles.
I was lead designer on the projects listed here, designing in-game messaging comps, animated announcements, one-off content announcement emails, and the communication template for BO4 onboarding emails.
Starting in October 2017, I began working as a designer and animator for Activision’s CRM department. My first assignment was creating assets and designing for the weekly Call of Duty email updates. Since then, I’ve moved on to creating in-game messages of the day, designing new email and web experiences, creating gifs for social media, handling game capture, and designing logos for monthly events.
Working in CRM gave me the opportunity to be more nimble in my design and react in real-time to consumer needs. I worked on creating content that was much more personalized than the previous style of social media content I’d done in the past, and we found a massive spike in consumer engagement in the months since.
Ubisoft had already been working with Modop for several years, but in late 2015 they began looking for exciting new avenues to advertise their newest franchise: The Division. Though we had already begun development on the Agent Intel teaser site, they wanted a new multimedia approach to the game's marketing. In fact, they wanted a concept that would tie directly into the game's weekly missions and assignments.
Operation ISAC solved a common issue that many MMOs have in regards to endgame weekly content. We wanted to give context to these missions by developing a side story that progressed beyond the main game's narrative. 24 3-minute episodes were produced, leaning heavily on live action and motion graphics to tell the story of Simon, a lone Agent, trapped within the confines of an ISAC computer system node.
What I did: I was one of the lead creatives during the pre-production process of the series. I helped shape the core narrative, as well as played a key role in creating the general aesthetic for the series. Once we hit post production, I designed many of the VFX shots and, along with the other designers, created a suite of animation templates to be used throughout the series. From title sequences to mission briefings, there is little that I didn't touch in the post-process of this series.
In 2016, Warner Bros. Interactive approached us at Modop to develop a series of trailers for the 2016-2017 season. Starting with E3, we created some of the most action packed and fan-service filled trailers this franchise had ever produced.
What I did: Starting with the RFP, I helped flesh out the early concepts behind the trailers, including lending a helping hand in editing storyboards, doing animatics, creating pitch decks, and developing jokes. I also animated the end-cards for each trailer and commercial.
During the buildup to launch of The Division, Ubisoft challenged Modop to create a wide range of social media assets for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
What I did: I designed a multitude of Division social media assets leading up to launch and in the post-launch window. Using Photoshop, in-game capture tools, After Effects, and Premier, I worked with an editor to cut clips from trailers, capture video from the game, and create compelling assets from these shots.
I also helped drive the direction of these assets, putting together pitch decks for the individual series and writing copy for many.
Lyfe was a short project undertaken by Joshua Russell, Alex Stanton, Brent Howard, and I in the winter of 2014. It tells the story of a man looking for love in a near-future dominated by social media applications. The cyberpunk aesthetic is its most defining feature, but we hope it also serves a cautionary tale to how our lives may be judged based on superficial Facebook and Instagram posts.
What I did: I wrote the original screenplay and painted, composited, and animated several matte paintings for multiple scenes. This was our first big indie-short, so we fired on all cylinders, nabbing a venue at Hulu headquarters and doing a full casting call. During post production, I focused entirely on the creation of the film's matte paintings to produce a taller, more futuristic Los Angeles.
Watch the film here.
A merman, an underwater cave, and a classic synth soundtrack. What's not to love about this music video by the up-and-coming Bonavega?
What I did: I created, composited, and color corrected the underwater shots in this merman music video. Starting with a couch and a green screen, I used After Effects and Photoshop to develop a stylized underwater man-cave!
Since the summer of 2016, I've been concepting, designing, copy-writing, and animating social media content for Lego Dimension's social media channels. Our content focuses on the unique franchise mashups and hilarious game capture shenanigans.
Starting in January 2017, I began art directing this project, overseeing a small team of designers, working directly with Warner Bros. Interactive and Traveler's Tale's Games to mold the voice and tone of each individual social channel.
After Hollow Mountain, an online comic by Austin James, launched its successful Kickstarter he approached my comic partner Julian Bishop and I with a proposal: create a short, entertaining sidestory to help flesh out the Hollow Mountain universe.
What I did: I wrote the story and painted the pages created by Julian Bishop. Drawing on what I learned from The Claim, I decided to expand my texture and color techniques, creating something significantly more lighthearted and dynamic that my previous work.
Ubisoft approached Modop to build a feature rich onboarding platform for The Division's Beta launch. We took that assignment one step further and created a robust lore-building website to help players dive into the game's world and explore life as an Agent.
Users took tests and unlocked unique rewards that would tease bits of the game, such as character dossiers, weapon loadouts, and enemy faction intel.
What I did: I helped develop the original content for this project, built the pitch, and then helped design, animate, and write copy for the final project. This project was particularly interesting because of the ever evolving nature of the game and we were quick to react to what fans were most curious about.
Julian Bishop and I's first comic book. Developed in late 2015, this project was our first major completed work and helped us hone our skills as writers and artists.
What I did: I wrote and colored this supernatural tale of conmen and South American death gods. Before this project I had done several assistant colorist jobs for Top Cow and Archaia, but this was the first time I was able to fully explore my coloring talents and create my own tale from scratch.
