JT Manning
Game Designer - World Design
Yorin Love With Me
(Systems)
I worked on all character designs and personalities, as well as the design philosophies of each character within this rogue-lite game.
Each character had difficulty attached to their romantic motivations and I wrote dialogue and mechanics from an early pipeline to reflect those quirks.
Each character had a difficulty rating and communicable narrative to associate someone attracted to teh main character, while also being difficult to defeat in romanctic combat.
Chronomancer
Encounter/World Designer
Designed, developed and iterated on a first-person looter-shooter with encounters and puzzles at the forefront of the design with time mechanics as the backbone.
A project meant to mirror the popular design of difficult to solve/deeply narrative-driven puzzles alongside engaging and challenging single-player moment-to-moment first-person action.
What I Learned:
Some mechanics take longer than others. Having a solid base for what can and can't be done in the right amount of time is crucial to being feature complete and successful.
Having a strong vision and a good pipeline is the difference between being able to finish on time and not.
Solaris Rift
Game Director
Systems, Encounter,
and Narrative Design
For Solaris Rift, I was the initial Design Lead and creator of the card game that would go from physical to digital. I iterated on PVE encounters through playtesting extensively, changing mechanics, and modifying the overall direction of the game throughout the project, while also creatively managing a highly scoped project.
Now Available on Steam.
Black Salt
Narrative/Systems Designer
A narrative design project where I worldbuilt a dark fantasy pirate story to meld with tactical RPG gameplay first. This project then evolved into a traditional Tabeltop RPG book. I worked on the narrative and systems for each version of this project, from digital design to physical.
The Chronicles of the Silver Rider
A Lord of the Rings Narrative
Narrative/Quest Designer
I took a pre-existing IP and created the entire narrative for a third-person action game. I designed and iterated on characters, locations, story beats, quests, dialogue, and narrative systems like branching paths and dialogue choices while keeping within the
realm of the IP.
The Cursed Levendria
Level/Narrative Designer
A level design focusing on environmental storytelling to tell the story of a gothic town poisoned by some entity, with secrets and reveals hidden all throughout the town.
