While working on Paladins as a community manager, I collaborated heavily with the Design team, eventually being trained under their Lead to transition to design myself. As a result of this, I’ve contributed to and tackled independently GDDs of varying scales, goals, and systems. Our project was small yet complex, so our goal was to outline clearly what we needed technically to accomplish our visions for certain designs. My earliest solo GDD was one for shifting our Support Class to have less of a healing focus and more diversity in how the role played, which I broke into an overview of the Class and then specific shifts across character kits:
After release, we continued to iterate on these values and make supplementary GDDs as necessary for specific character kits and conflict points between our several layers of balancing. However, overall, this balance pass was considered a success and the overall identity of the Support class continued to improve throughout my tenure. There are additional examples of GDDs I’ve worked on for released content in Deep Dive: Wave Defense Mode and Deep Dive: Ranked Systems & Matchmaking. However, there were also several conceptual/practice design tasks I would frequently do to continue refining my skills alongside the team, including new character kit pitches. The aim of these were to create new playstyles and identities for potential additions to the game. These were purely done for self-development and never slated for release, but showcase a different style of design documentation:
Kryptek Game Design Portfolio 