Professional Video Game Designer

with over 10 years of experience and 6 shipped AAA titles

Career History

Blake began a career in AAA game development at Toys For Bob in 2011 working on the original “Toys To Life” video game series, SKYLANDERS. Blake has worked on every TFB Skylanders game (Spyro’s Adventure, Giants, Trap Team and Imaginators) doing design and implementation of enemy characters and combat systems, including arena combat, random encounters and Battle Gongs. Blake also prototyped a Skylanders Horde mode that was later developed by Beenox.

After 5 years of Skylanders games, Blake got a chance to remake one of their favorite PlayStation games from childhood: Spyro the Dragon. Faithfully capturing the feeling of the first games, Blake helped recreate things they both loved and hated from the original, including mooning Gnorcs, sleeping dogs and annoying egg thieves (Nah nahnah nah nah!) as well as some bosses like Gnasty and Gulp (sorry...)

Blake then worked on designing boss fights for the new title Crash Bandicoot 4, a direct sequel to another childhood favorite! Blake helped design some gameplay and boss battle systems and developed two epic boss fights, N.Gin and N.Tropy(s), from prototype to completion.

Skills and Experience

  • Combat Systems Design

  • Enemy Design

  • Epic Boss Battles

  • Iterative Prototyping

  • Creative/ Narrative Writing

  • Unreal Engine

  • Unity (C#)

  • Photoshop

  • After Effects

  • Graphic Design

Notable Work

Skylanders Arena Combat

  • Designed and implemented systems for scripting dynamic waves of enemies and hazards used by multiple designers

  • Designed extra challenge modes with unique rules and win conditions, populated by other designers

Spyro’s Knockback

  • Developed a dynamic system for launching enemies backwards and playing different animations when hitting a wall or floor (or splashing if the falling enemy hits a water surface)

  • Focused on making each enemy impact feel powerful and juicy

Annoying Chase Sequences

  • Faithfully recreated the mechanics of the most annoying enemies in Spyro 1, the taunting egg thieves and Gnasty Gnorc himself.

  • Worked with audio team to get the thieves’ infamous “NYA NYA NYA NYA” vo sounding similar enough to the original to trigger nostalgia (and frustration) from long-time fans.

  • Added a new feature that detects when Spyro smacks into a wall while chasing a thief, triggering a taunting chuckle as they get away!

Gnorc Butts

  • In one level of the original Spyro game, some Gnorc soldiers, in certain circumstances, would taunt the player by turning around and showing their butts. I took this as a personal mission to ensure this beloved easter egg returned (and in a way that wouldn’t affect our ESRB rating).

Boss Fights

  • Recreated the Gulp boss fight from Spyro 2, using the barrel knockback/explosion system I designed for earlier levels in Spyro 1.

  • Designed, prototyped and implemented two of the most ambitious, over the top bosses from Crash 4:

    • N. Gin’s giant drumming junkyard robot battle. Created unique music-based dodging gameplay, dynamic platforming puzzles and worked closely with concept artists and modelers to design a functional giant robot as well as with the lead audio engineer to create bespoke systems for controlling the robot animation and attack timing in perfect sync with the music. It was a massively ambitious design that required close communications with every department.

    • N. Tropy’s reality-bending 3 part boss fight. This fight required many unique new systems working together to create gameplay that heightened previous gameplay mechanics to the extreme. It starts with a trippy retrospective ride through the shards of the previous realities you’ve played through, into a massive asteroid field orbiting an even more massive space station (for which I was nearly murdered by both the art and engineering teams but managed to optimize) then finally into a “2D-wrapped-around-a-cylinder” section of gravity inverting gameplay that I prototyped specifically for this fight and was subsequently turned into a mask power for use in the rest of the game.

    • These battles (particularly N. Tropy) were the hardest challenges I’ve faced in my career and I learned some valuable lessons about successful inter-departmental collaboration and slightly less successful scope management.

What’s Next?

Now I am looking for new opportunities, both in game development and other avenues of creativity, and I am open to many possible future directions. Recently I have been working on some personal projects, experiments and sorting through my way-too-many ideas.

If you have any leads on interesting work that might either fit my specific skill set or expand my areas of expertise, please contact me either on LinkedIn or one of the other social media sites linked in the upper left. I’m always looking for new and exciting challenges!