Work
Six live worlds across twenty-four years, and one product of my own. For each, what the design problem actually was and the shape of the answer.
- 2023–26
Horizon Hunters Gathering
Guerrilla · Associate Director
Associate director on Guerrilla's co-op Horizon game. Responsible for the episodic campaign and one of the game's two primary rogue-lite modes: coaching a cross-disciplinary team of designers and leads, setting content guidelines with design leads and product owners, and driving quality across core systems, world, and narrative.
- 2019–23
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
Massive Entertainment · Lead Narrative Designer
Led a team of quest designers through the campaign of an open-world adventure. Owned quest flow, tutorialization, and onboarding; held quality and schedule across cross-functional and multi-studio teams; and mentored designers while keeping stakeholder relationships productive.
- 2016–20
The Division 2 + Warlords of New York
Massive Entertainment · Senior Narrative Designer
Narrative design across the sequel and its Warlords of New York expansion: mission content, in-game narrative assets, and the seasonal structure that keeps a live shooter supplied with reasons to return.
- 2014–16
Tom Clancy's The Division
Massive Entertainment · Senior Narrative Designer
Narrative and mission design for a shared-world shooter, threading story through a systemic open city and coordinating delivery across international studios so the content read as one coherent world.
- 2009–13
Defiance
Trion Worlds · Senior Content Designer
Mission and world design for a shooter-MMO built to move in lockstep with a weekly TV series. Drove content from documentation through implementation, tuned combat and encounter design alongside systems and audio, and iterated on gameplay against internal and external playtest metrics.
- 2003–09
EverQuest II
Sony Online Entertainment · Game Designer to Lead Content Designer
Six years inside a live MMO, rising from raid and questline design to leading the content team through The Shadow Odyssey and half of Sentinel's Fate. Built long heritage questlines and group content, trained new designers on the scripting pipeline, and stood up the game's first microtransaction storefront: its catalog, pricing, and items.
Case study
Hangarworks
An org-level crafting and logistics tool for Star Citizen organizations. Designed, built, shipped, and maintained by one person, live on the App Store and the web with real users.
The problem
Star Citizen organizations run real industrial operations (mining, crafting, and supplying a fleet), but coordinate them across spreadsheets, pinned Discord messages, and memory. There is no shared answer to the questions that matter: who has what, who needs what, what’s already reserved, and what to build next.
The design decisions
One shared source of truth for an org. A blueprint catalog tied to live game data, so plans reflect what the patch actually allows. A planner that does the material math (need against on-hand against pooled stock) instead of leaving it to a spreadsheet. A stock with reservations, an internal market in the in-game currency, and a request ledger that tracks an order from open to fulfilled.
The build
A Next.js web app on Vercel and a native SwiftUI app for iOS, with a Kotlin and Jetpack Compose app for Android in progress, all on one Firebase backend: Firestore for data and sync, authentication, cloud functions, push, and app-integrity checks. Subscriptions run through Stripe on the web and RevenueCat on mobile. The permission and ranks logic is written once and kept in parity across TypeScript, Swift, and Kotlin with cross-language tests, so a member sees the same rules on every device.
Where it stands
Live and maintained, updated with the game. It’s the proof behind the product-development side of Arc Theory: one person holding the whole picture, from the data model to the typography.
If your world needs to keep going, or your product needs building.
Email Noel