I joined the team for Eternal Strands about halfway through development. When I arrived, Brynn had rough versions of most of her toolkit already implemented, but the team had been struggling to get them finished because there wasn’t a designer solely dedicated to them. That was where I came in.

I began by fully auditing the ability set, offering suggestions for ways to improve the abilities and increase the complexity of the weapon archetypes. As the new vision holder for these abilities, I had leeway to make significant changes and improvements. Some of the highlights of this work were:

• Adding combos to the bow to bring its complexity in line with the other weapons

• Experimenting with alternate versions of certain mantle powers

• Implementing behavior for certain abilities that is contingent on the temperature of the surrounding area

• Designing novel synergies between powers

Some of these experiments ended up being more complexity than the game needed, especially as we sped up the pace of combat and removed loadout restrictions over the course of development. However, many of them were hugely positive and offered new and interesting ways for the player to approach combat.

As development continued, I polished these abilities and eventually passed some off to another designer who joined us just over a year later. Working together, we fine tuned the pace of combat, worked out the final issues with the abilities, and even added new functionality. Because we were sharing the load, I was able to find time to implement features that were cut because of a lack of programmer time (particularly the ability reflect projectiles by parrying them).

As is the nature of working on an indie team, I ended up doing more than just working on Brynn’s abilities. I also took over development for several enemies, including most of the Surgeborn, the Ember Servant, and one of the towering Ark bosses. While working on these enemies, I crafted notably complex state machines and worked with programmers to improve the tools that designers have access to for pathfinding, target selection, and decision making.