Avalon

Lead Game Designer

MAR 2022 - JUN 2026 • CREATE AVALON CORP

Unreal Engine 5

MMORPG

UGC

Closed Alpha

Avalon is a community-created MMORPG blending the depth of tabletop RPGs with the scale of a persistent online world. Players explore realms, conquer dungeons, craft equipment, and battle in fast-paced skill-based combat, all while wielding the same creation tools used to build the game itself to design their own levels, stories, and worlds for others.

I was Avalon's first game designer and became Lead after the Vertical Slice. I owned the vision for Creator Mode, led the design of Elysara, and designed the harvesting and crafting systems underneath it. I worked across design, engineering, environment art, and production to take each of those features from concept through live iteration. Avalon reached closed alpha before I left.

My Role

What I owned on Avalon

Led world and level design, from early concept through Closed Alpha, establishing world structure, production standards, and content-pacing guidelines used across the team.
Designed and shipped Elysara, Avalon's first playable world, defining its biomes, progression zones, critical path, and major points of interest across a 6 km² high-fantasy environment.
Built Avalon's first dungeon from scratch, designing its layout, encounters, and boss fight while establishing a content template the design team used for future dungeons.
Developed the team's technical expertise in world-streaming systems, setting up data layers, HLOD parameters, streaming rules, and creating editor utility widgets to keep a large open world performant at scale.
Designed the harvesting and crafting pipeline, including reusable PCG-based harvesting tools and the resource, recipe, and building-cost data that supported the game's crafting economy.
Owned Creator Mode from prototype through Closed Alpha, first as vision holder and later as Design Lead, defining the core building experience and object-placement foundation.
Designed a magnet-point snapping system that standardized assets across kits, making builds visually consistent while letting individual pieces be remixed between kits.
Designed the game's Prefab System, allowing up to 1,500 unique assets to be combined into grouped objects that players could place, edit, and share.
Designed Merlin, a no-code card-based system that let players create and share gameplay logic without programming.
Directed early world design for Vireon, a cyberpunk desert environment, establishing its verticality, world structure, and initial POIs through pre-production.

Selected Works

Three things from Avalon I want to walk through in more depth: the gameplay systems, the tools, and the world they all support.

Creator Mode

Avalon's player-facing creation toolset · prototype through Closed Alpha

Players will always outnumber developers, and the games that run out of content are usually the ones that never gave players real tools to make their own. Avalon's answer was to give players the same creation tools the team used to build the game itself, a hard constraint that meant the core game had to serve as a proof of concept for the toolset. Every system I designed had to work for both a professional dev team and a player placing their first wall.

Avalon's combat runs off the number keys, so I bound Creator Mode's tools to the same keys: duplicating a selection is the 3 key, reached the same way you'd reach for a spell. I translated every basic engine transform, move, rotate, scale, into an action a player could execute directly, and replaced drag-select with a 3D volume you place and stretch around what you want to select. Building was designed to feel like the rest of the game, not a separate mode bolted onto it.

Managed all building-kit asset integration, working with external outsourcers to deliver the Village, Dungeon, Castle, Foliage, and Cyberpunk Skyscraper kits to one consistent standard
Built interaction systems for smart objects like doors and lanterns, and an NPC spawning tool, letting players populate and animate the spaces they built

Merlin

Avalon's no-code, card-based logic system

With Creator Mode handling building, the next challenge was making game logic itself accessible to players. I researched how Roblox, Minecraft, Halo Infinite, and Warcraft 3 approached player-authored logic before designing Avalon's own answer.

A traditional node graph would have been too complex for players without a development background, so I designed Merlin around a card-based system instead. Each card runs on an event and action, a trigger and its response, and attaches to a physical object in the world to create things like monster spawners or loot chests. I also designed Merlin's interface to share Creator Mode's controls and layout, so the two toolsets felt like one system.

Made player-authored logic as remixable as player-built objects, using the same sharing and editing model as Creator Mode's Prefabs
Worked with engineering to create Merlin-infused objects and VFX, expanding what player-authored logic could trigger beyond basic spawners and traps

Elysara

Avalon's first playable world · 6 km² · 3 biomes · 11 zones

I led the design of Elysara, a high-fantasy floating island built around a central progression arc, from a starting village through increasingly dangerous zones to the endgame Tower, working closely with environment art and concept teams throughout. I set the biome and zone structure, the critical path, and POI placement, and personally designed the starting sequence and the game's first dungeon.

I marked Restricted Zones around the developer content I wanted preserved, leaving the rest of the world open to player claims.

Set the content template the team used for future dungeons and starting sequences
Became the team's HLOD and PCG subject-matter expert, building the technical workflows needed to keep a 6 km² world performant