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Game Developer & Designer
Explore My Work Below!
Hello everyone! My name is Natalie. I'm a 29-year-old professional breaking into game development. After spending my younger life enjoying the masterful experiences crafted by developers all over the globe, I now challenge myself to create my own worlds, write my own stories, and chart my path as a game developer.
My experience lies in designing levels, programming scripts to craft compelling experiences, and writing game reviews. My portfolio showcases my personal, academic, and professional work in game development and the games industry at large. Whether you're a potential employer, a fellow game developer, or simply someone who appreciates gaming, I invite you to explore my projects, see what I can offer, and what I can bring to your team.
My Portfolio
Welcome to my portfolio! Here you’ll find a selection of my various personal, academic, and professional works. Click on one of the projects below to learn more about my experience.
Tile-Based Mechanics
Introduction: At Full Sail University one of our many class projects consisted of familiarizing with and iterating on an in-work project. We were to develop one mechanic ourselves, and follow along our peers instructions to ingrate their mechanic. Attempting to marry the two mechanics to create compelling gameplay. The mechanic I chose to implement is the "Action Counter" inspired by the counter used in the game Helltakers.
What Went Right:
Workflow - My first sprint went very well, and integration of my mechanic was finished very quickly. I had a method and plan in mind before I edited any code, and by doing so wasted no time when the moment came to do the legwork. Proper planning in the early stages can set the tone for the entire project.
Consistency - During our second sprint I did my best to keep a good thing going and to set a plan down before moving forward. This paid off and made integration of new mechanics and ideas easier, and with the planning I had in my earlier sprint, I tried to make my additions as modular as I could because I was concerned about interfering with my peers' workflows when they attempted to integrate my mechanic.
Time for Creativity - I expected the creative process of my level design to be time consuming for my second sprint. Luckily this means I had a lot of time set aside to focus on exploring these mechanics on my own and seeing what I could invoke from the player with each puzzle. Originally, I wanted to design my levels around pixel art themes. Every level is a new picture, but after just the first level, I realized that was easier said than done given my time frame. I instead decided to pivot my focus towards creating visually and mentally challenging puzzles. I tried to play around with "noise" in the level designs to see how much or how little I was able to obscure the solution to the player.
What Went Wrong:
Debugging - Encountering bugs is a guarantee in software development, but boy did my bugs bog me down. Any time I encountered an issue I found myself almost panicking, racing through my mind what different ways I could rewrite everything to solve the problem. In the end the most glaring bug fixes weren't the ones I stressed about for over an hour. They were the ones that required calm thought and a rubber duck (Or in my case, a rabbit).
Communication - Using Click-Up our class assigned and organized our various tasks and choreographed them accordingly to our workflows. During our second sprint I wasn't as responsive and attentive with my peers as I would have liked to be. It showed me I need to make more of a point to set aside more time for collaborations.
Research - My creative process was very undirected and unstructured. At a certain point in level design I felt like I was spinning my wheels in the sand, throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck. In the future I'll spend more time researching and more carefully identifying the aspects I want to take inspiration from.
Conclusion: I learned a lot about myself, and the intricacies of my own creative process. Thanks to the challenges afforded to me in this project I was able to identify key aspects of my workflow that can be improved built off of. Before this project I had yet to really work on tile-based experiences and data-driven programming. I'm inspired and motivated to take the things I've learned from my mentors and peers forward into my personal and professional work.
What Went Right:
Workflow - My first sprint went very well, and integration of my mechanic was finished very quickly. I had a method and plan in mind before I edited any code, and by doing so wasted no time when the moment came to do the legwork. Proper planning in the early stages can set the tone for the entire project.
Consistency - During our second sprint I did my best to keep a good thing going and to set a plan down before moving forward. This paid off and made integration of new mechanics and ideas easier, and with the planning I had in my earlier sprint, I tried to make my additions as modular as I could because I was concerned about interfering with my peers' workflows when they attempted to integrate my mechanic.
Time for Creativity - I expected the creative process of my level design to be time consuming for my second sprint. Luckily this means I had a lot of time set aside to focus on exploring these mechanics on my own and seeing what I could invoke from the player with each puzzle. Originally, I wanted to design my levels around pixel art themes. Every level is a new picture, but after just the first level, I realized that was easier said than done given my time frame. I instead decided to pivot my focus towards creating visually and mentally challenging puzzles. I tried to play around with "noise" in the level designs to see how much or how little I was able to obscure the solution to the player.
What Went Wrong:
Debugging - Encountering bugs is a guarantee in software development, but boy did my bugs bog me down. Any time I encountered an issue I found myself almost panicking, racing through my mind what different ways I could rewrite everything to solve the problem. In the end the most glaring bug fixes weren't the ones I stressed about for over an hour. They were the ones that required calm thought and a rubber duck (Or in my case, a rabbit).
Communication - Using Click-Up our class assigned and organized our various tasks and choreographed them accordingly to our workflows. During our second sprint I wasn't as responsive and attentive with my peers as I would have liked to be. It showed me I need to make more of a point to set aside more time for collaborations.
Research - My creative process was very undirected and unstructured. At a certain point in level design I felt like I was spinning my wheels in the sand, throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck. In the future I'll spend more time researching and more carefully identifying the aspects I want to take inspiration from.
Conclusion: I learned a lot about myself, and the intricacies of my own creative process. Thanks to the challenges afforded to me in this project I was able to identify key aspects of my workflow that can be improved built off of. Before this project I had yet to really work on tile-based experiences and data-driven programming. I'm inspired and motivated to take the things I've learned from my mentors and peers forward into my personal and professional work.
Academic Adventure
Introduction: This project is a walking simulator/platformer that takes the player up a temperate mountain full of hexagonal rock columns inspired by The Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. Once at the top the player will dangerously leap across a great chasm, and make their way into a deep cave. Inside they will find a crystal chasm that will test their platforming skills. Rewarded for their skill they must now ascend above the mountain and arrive at a mysterious and ancient temple. After paying their respects, they’ll leap to the temple exit and prepare for their next adventure.
What Went Right:
Theming - At first I was very concerned how much my partners and I would be able to mesh together our creative visions to try and form a cohesive experience. Thankfully with the technology available to us we’re able to share ideas as well as assets for our projects regardless of the day or time. This has enabled us to key in on each others workflows more intuitively and react accordingly without the need for excessive sharing of information.
Hunting for Assets - Thanks to Unreal Engines massive catalog of assets it was really easy to find and accumulate what I needed in order to put the vision together. My biggest concern was finding an asset pack that contained hexagonal pillars, as I had decided during the design process I wanted these geometric shapes to be a cornerstone of the location's uniqueness. Luckily I managed to find two hexagonal rock pillars the fit the criteria for both my design idea as well as the project guidelines. These pillars needing to be so specific guided the rest of the areas design with regard to what kinds of rock surfaces we could find in the region. Currently we have a slate/basalt kind of consistency with a focus on darker colors to reinforce the idea of excessive moisture in the atmosphere.
Landscaping - While admittedly finding a landscape that works for my setting was challenging (and I will cover those issues later) designing and implementing said landscape was relatively intuitive as an experience. Once I was comfortable using the painting and sculpting tools, putting them to use was very straightforward and simple. Getting to utilize layers of different materials made a world of difference in making my neutral areas come to life. Since I already knew where I wanted to put everything, it became a simple matter of elbow grease in putting all the pieces where they belong.
Implementing the Idea - Once I knew what I wanted to have as my key set pieces, creating a level flow to go along with it was very easy. I definitely put in too much work during the blockmesh design process, but that gave me a very intricate template to iterate around as I encountered different challenges during Beta to Gold. Thanks to our detailed design guidelines I had just enough restriction to inspire ideas, without so many options that I was creatively unfocused.
Workflow Management - Luckily I’ve been able to manage my time around this project and what it’s needed fairly well. While I obviously would love more time to add more details and polish more, with the time I had available to me I managed to accomplish what I set out to do. My workflow enabled me to stay tuned in to many past habits that created certain issues for me later on in the design phases. I learned a lot about where I stumbled in my previous design work and I was able to use that in Beta to alleviate further issues.
What Went Wrong:
Optimizing asset migration - For asset migration I decided to migrate what I needed and replace the models one at a time at first. This worked pretty well in the beginning when I didn’t need so many diverse models unlike with foliage. Many meshes and materials relied on shared resource textures and albedos that would lose references whenever I would transfer say one kind of slate rock and when I transfer the next model it would need it’s materials all reassigned. Collision on my migrated assets has also been an issue that has required me to experiment with certain models, creating duplicates in attempts to mitigate the amorphous shapes of the collision volumes when scaled.
Landscape resolutions - So many high resolution packs… and even the lower resolution ones can just chew through the texture stream bandwidth. I ended up having to remove essentially half of my total landscape vista just to comply with texture streaming limitations. I tried several landscapes in test environments and I struggled to find one that worked well. Luckily enough for me, the landscape that was provided in the internal files for a temperate jungle forest floor worked very well for my setting, and with the added layers for puddles I can better illustrate the irrigation of certain area, such as the first pitfall in my level start.
Blockmesh too busy - My blockmesh, while good for illustrating a clear creative vision, was a mess to navigate around. It became very clear to me how unoptimized my placements of certain blocks were, and that at a certain point I stopped caring about polygon count. In Gold I don’t have that luxury, so a lot of assets had to be cleaned up and replaced. Working with mountainous regions and many different rock faces proved to be difficult when trying to replace key meshes, and that one cliff face could be anywhere from one to ten static block meshes.
Time - I never had a concrete schedule for working on certain areas or requirements. On one hand, it meant when I encountered issues and had to extend work sessions that I didn’t feel discouraged, but it also meant there was no accountability for where all my time went aside from my standups and changelists. While I’m largely a proponent of “It takes however long it takes.” I wish I did have a log of my work and how long each process took so I cna optimize it further in the future and better illustrate my problem points.
Technical Hurdles - Landscaping took three times longer than it needed because of technical issues forcing me to start from scratch each time. Replacing block meshes took longer than it should’ve just because of messier past work, and lighting took a couple days from my team alone just due to bugs after a build, forcing a revert. As I’ve mentioned before texture streaming was an issue for me. At first I thought it was due to foliage, so I changed LOD bias settings and removed meshes ending up with zero performance change to show for it. After deleting half of my landscape vista however I’ve encountered zero issues and the texture overload ceased.
Conclusion: In summary, a lot went right, and a lot went wrong. One thing is for sure I learned a lot more about myself and how to better make use of my time and energy in future projects. The issues I encountered gave me a glimpse at what can happen in the future when I’m not careful about how I solve certain problems or how I take accountability for myself and my work/time. Roughing out levels in blockmesh is a serene and almost spiritual experience as you're both viewing your ideas with your naked eye and the vision held in your imagination. Seeing it all come together in the final project was such an exciting experience. I was working on my level even more than I initially planned, because I enjoyed seeing it all come alive so much. Level design is a new passion of mine I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I have during my time here at FullSail. I’m proud of both mine, and my peers progress in our projects as we all develop further into better professionals and creatives.
What Went Right:
Theming - At first I was very concerned how much my partners and I would be able to mesh together our creative visions to try and form a cohesive experience. Thankfully with the technology available to us we’re able to share ideas as well as assets for our projects regardless of the day or time. This has enabled us to key in on each others workflows more intuitively and react accordingly without the need for excessive sharing of information.
Hunting for Assets - Thanks to Unreal Engines massive catalog of assets it was really easy to find and accumulate what I needed in order to put the vision together. My biggest concern was finding an asset pack that contained hexagonal pillars, as I had decided during the design process I wanted these geometric shapes to be a cornerstone of the location's uniqueness. Luckily I managed to find two hexagonal rock pillars the fit the criteria for both my design idea as well as the project guidelines. These pillars needing to be so specific guided the rest of the areas design with regard to what kinds of rock surfaces we could find in the region. Currently we have a slate/basalt kind of consistency with a focus on darker colors to reinforce the idea of excessive moisture in the atmosphere.
Landscaping - While admittedly finding a landscape that works for my setting was challenging (and I will cover those issues later) designing and implementing said landscape was relatively intuitive as an experience. Once I was comfortable using the painting and sculpting tools, putting them to use was very straightforward and simple. Getting to utilize layers of different materials made a world of difference in making my neutral areas come to life. Since I already knew where I wanted to put everything, it became a simple matter of elbow grease in putting all the pieces where they belong.
Implementing the Idea - Once I knew what I wanted to have as my key set pieces, creating a level flow to go along with it was very easy. I definitely put in too much work during the blockmesh design process, but that gave me a very intricate template to iterate around as I encountered different challenges during Beta to Gold. Thanks to our detailed design guidelines I had just enough restriction to inspire ideas, without so many options that I was creatively unfocused.
Workflow Management - Luckily I’ve been able to manage my time around this project and what it’s needed fairly well. While I obviously would love more time to add more details and polish more, with the time I had available to me I managed to accomplish what I set out to do. My workflow enabled me to stay tuned in to many past habits that created certain issues for me later on in the design phases. I learned a lot about where I stumbled in my previous design work and I was able to use that in Beta to alleviate further issues.
What Went Wrong:
Optimizing asset migration - For asset migration I decided to migrate what I needed and replace the models one at a time at first. This worked pretty well in the beginning when I didn’t need so many diverse models unlike with foliage. Many meshes and materials relied on shared resource textures and albedos that would lose references whenever I would transfer say one kind of slate rock and when I transfer the next model it would need it’s materials all reassigned. Collision on my migrated assets has also been an issue that has required me to experiment with certain models, creating duplicates in attempts to mitigate the amorphous shapes of the collision volumes when scaled.
Landscape resolutions - So many high resolution packs… and even the lower resolution ones can just chew through the texture stream bandwidth. I ended up having to remove essentially half of my total landscape vista just to comply with texture streaming limitations. I tried several landscapes in test environments and I struggled to find one that worked well. Luckily enough for me, the landscape that was provided in the internal files for a temperate jungle forest floor worked very well for my setting, and with the added layers for puddles I can better illustrate the irrigation of certain area, such as the first pitfall in my level start.
Blockmesh too busy - My blockmesh, while good for illustrating a clear creative vision, was a mess to navigate around. It became very clear to me how unoptimized my placements of certain blocks were, and that at a certain point I stopped caring about polygon count. In Gold I don’t have that luxury, so a lot of assets had to be cleaned up and replaced. Working with mountainous regions and many different rock faces proved to be difficult when trying to replace key meshes, and that one cliff face could be anywhere from one to ten static block meshes.
Time - I never had a concrete schedule for working on certain areas or requirements. On one hand, it meant when I encountered issues and had to extend work sessions that I didn’t feel discouraged, but it also meant there was no accountability for where all my time went aside from my standups and changelists. While I’m largely a proponent of “It takes however long it takes.” I wish I did have a log of my work and how long each process took so I cna optimize it further in the future and better illustrate my problem points.
Technical Hurdles - Landscaping took three times longer than it needed because of technical issues forcing me to start from scratch each time. Replacing block meshes took longer than it should’ve just because of messier past work, and lighting took a couple days from my team alone just due to bugs after a build, forcing a revert. As I’ve mentioned before texture streaming was an issue for me. At first I thought it was due to foliage, so I changed LOD bias settings and removed meshes ending up with zero performance change to show for it. After deleting half of my landscape vista however I’ve encountered zero issues and the texture overload ceased.
Conclusion: In summary, a lot went right, and a lot went wrong. One thing is for sure I learned a lot more about myself and how to better make use of my time and energy in future projects. The issues I encountered gave me a glimpse at what can happen in the future when I’m not careful about how I solve certain problems or how I take accountability for myself and my work/time. Roughing out levels in blockmesh is a serene and almost spiritual experience as you're both viewing your ideas with your naked eye and the vision held in your imagination. Seeing it all come together in the final project was such an exciting experience. I was working on my level even more than I initially planned, because I enjoyed seeing it all come alive so much. Level design is a new passion of mine I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I have during my time here at FullSail. I’m proud of both mine, and my peers progress in our projects as we all develop further into better professionals and creatives.
Stack-O-Bot: Escape from Erebus
Our very first game design class at Full Sail University took us into the Stack-O-Bot toolkit using Unreal Engine 5. Our assignment: To make a level within the specified guidelines using the tools available to us.
My very first level every designed. Our scene is set in the desolate planet of Erebus. One day you, Stack-O-Bot, are activated. Awakening to a deserted worksite in a dangerous canyon filled with broken down equipment and erratic machines. There is nothing for you here but hostility and the decay of time. You must break out of the work site and venture into the vast emptiness beyond.
My very first level every designed. Our scene is set in the desolate planet of Erebus. One day you, Stack-O-Bot, are activated. Awakening to a deserted worksite in a dangerous canyon filled with broken down equipment and erratic machines. There is nothing for you here but hostility and the decay of time. You must break out of the work site and venture into the vast emptiness beyond.
Baby's First Blockmesh
During my time at Full Sail University we were given five reference images. We were tasked to select one of the five and create our first blockmesh using the photo to best of our ability. We were to do our best to match the blockmesh screenshot with the photograph. Doing this we would need to take into account the signature pieces of the scene, the scale of these pieces relative to the camera view and player character, as well as the colors and lighting on display. This is my very first blockmesh!
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