Senior Mission Designer — Skate

As Senior Mission Designer on Skate, I lead the conception, design, and delivery of high-impact missions that define player progression, evoke the culture of skateboarding, and drive engagement across the live game. I bridge creative vision and production realities to ensure missions are fun, balanced, and technically feasible while fitting the overall game economy and narrative.

Core responsibilities

Mission vision and strategy: Define mission pillars and objectives that support the game’s design goals, player retention targets, and live-service roadmap. Set standards for mission variety, difficulty curve, and reward pacing.

Creative direction: Author and iterate mission briefs, flowcharts, and playable prototypes. Establish tone, stakes, and player motivations for each mission type (trick challenges, exploration runs, rival encounters, freelance gigs, timed events).

Systems integration: Work closely with gameplay, level design, animation, and UI teams to integrate mission requirements with core mechanics (trick scoring, physics interactions, ragdoll, controller input), ensuring consistent and responsive player experience.

Level and encounter design: Design mission-specific objectives, spawn logic, NPC behaviors, and environmental interactions. Define prop placement, required ramps/rails, and risk/reward lines that enable intended trick combos and emergent moments.

Live-ops and event design: Create repeatable and limited-time missions for seasonal content, community events, and competitive modes. Balance reusability with freshness through modifier systems, leaderboard integration, and dynamic objectives.

Technical documentation and pipelines: Produce detailed design documents, mission state machines, acceptance criteria, and implementation checklists. Author data-driven templates and tools to allow designers and scripters to iterate quickly.

Prototyping and iteration: Rapidly prototype mission concepts in-engine or via blockouts, conduct playtests, collect telemetry, and iterate on objectives, scoring, and pacing based on quantitative and qualitative feedback.

Cross-discipline leadership: Coordinate with producers, QA, audio, narrative, monetization, and marketing to align mission scope, milestones, and deliverables. Mentor junior designers and reviewers to raise quality and consistency across missions.

Balancing and tuning: Define scoring systems, XP/reward curves, and risk/reward balances. Use telemetry and AB testing to tune difficulty, completion rates, and economy impact.

Polish and accessibility: Ensure clear onboarding for new players, accessible difficulty options, and satisfying reward feedback loops (visual, audio, and haptic) that enhance the physicality of skateboarding.

Stakeholder communication: Present mission concepts, status updates, and postmortems to leadership and partners. Advocate for player-centric improvements and prioritize roadmap features based on impact and feasibility.

Key outcomes

High-retention mission loops that complement free-roam skate play and contribute to long-term player engagement.

A diverse mission suite that supports skill progression, social play, and community-created content.

Efficient pipelines and tools that enable rapid content iteration and consistent mission quality across updates.

Clear metrics demonstrating improved completion rates, player satisfaction, and monetization health where applicable.

Tools and methods

Level editor and in-engine prototyping tools, state machine editors, scriptable event systems

Telemetry analysis platforms, AB testing frameworks, and analytics dashboards

Design documentation (GDDs), flowcharts, task trackers, and sprint planning tools

Playtesting sessions, usability studies, and community feedback loops

What I bring

Deep understanding of skate culture and how to translate its nuance into game mechanics and mission scenarios.

Strong systems thinking to design missions that scale within a live-service framework.

Collaborative leadership that empowers teams to ship polished, player-first content on a predictable cadence.