Ryan Woods - Developer and Designer
Welcome to my portfolio! I am a game designer and developer based in the Southeastern US.
If I had to muse about the type of design I try to achieve, I aim for getting the most out of a limited system. Depth over breadth. I admire games like Portal that cause a player to look at a simple room layout that they've seen in 100s of other games with a fresh perspective and sense of curiosity. An ideal design for me has a minimal amount of moving pieces continuously interacting and compounding with one another.
I worked as a game designer for House of How from 05/2021 - 05/2026, beginning as a Junior Game Designer and moving up to Associate Game Designer and finally Game Designer. In this time I had the opportunity to work on a huge variety of projects. I will list what I can here, but of course many things are for unreleased or cancelled games that are covered by NDAs.
12/2025-04/2026: Contract with Crystal Dynamics
- Drew highly detailed vector paper maps for an unannounced DLC for an upcoming release which accounted for a 4.5 hour player path full of combat, exploration, puzzle solving, and challenging traversal.
- Created paper maps and UE5 whitebox levels with an emphasis on no-combat cinematic traversal and exploration for an unannounced title.
11/2025-12/2025 Multiplayer Shooter Prototype
- Managed playtesting for a prototype gamemode designed for a popular long-running online shooter using Unreal Engine 5.
- Wrote, collected, and compiled user surveys to analyze and assist with action plans to meet a tight deadline.
03/2025-10/2025: Battlefield 6 Portal
- Created experiences within early SDK versions for the new Battlefield Portal mode during its development.
- Got up to date on their systems and processes based on early documentation while the underlying game was still going through rapid changes due to ongoing development.
- Shipped the Bomb Squad mode, which is provided with its Typescript source code with the SDK download for all users.
- The levels my coworkers and I created were used in early promotional materials, including videos and given to popular content creators during closed betas.
- Sat in as the representative for House of How during playtest sessions of Portal experiences with Ripple Effect Games.
09/2022-12/2022: Minecraft Legends
- Experimented with making an Musou-inspired action combat system with the UGC tools for the Ichorous Grove DLC experience.
- Designed player and enemy move sets within the constraints of the scripting layer provided and no UI modification tools.
- Created Design Beat documents for the player-path that assisted with pacing through development.
02/2022-02/2025: Unannounced Title
- Worked from prototype to end of production on a roguelike deckbuilder based on a major IP, published by Paradox Interactive.
- The first few months were spent with a very small strike team to build the prototype, which was meant to represent a vertical slice of the first 3rd of the game content, with 1 of our planned characters.
- I owned the combat systems, encounters, and AI behaviors for the entire experience. I also worked closely with UI artists, gameplay engineers, and often represented the design team for any cross-disciplinary meetings regarding combat or progression systems.
- I created a social system that usd the players' cards in an innovative way, so that you were building your characters' social abilities as well as their combat abilities with the same pieces (somewhat inspired by Griftlands, but with a pillar of Dual Functionality for every card).
- By the numbers I shipped
- >250 finalized card designs for the final release (after many cuts).
- >80 finalized character modifier designs (like Relics in Slay the Spire).
- >70 character designs, many of which were recruitable into the player's party, some had multiple phases, and all had their own combat abilities.
- >120 possible combat encounters.
12/2021-02/2022: Raini: The Lords of Light
- Worked on all initial paper design for the CCG Raini: The Lords of Light. I used spreadsheets to create all card behaviors within an extremely limited time window, and tested the game systems out on paper prior to handing off the engineering team for implementation. I also met with the client and offered consulting for system and economy designs.
11/2021: Draft Kings
- Worked on maintaining a YAML pipeline within Azure DevOps to generate NFT (remember those?) sports cards for Draft Kings. The pipeline would take input spreadsheets, and used Photoshop and Unity CLI commands to generate these cards, which we would return to the client.
05/2021-10/2021: Unannounced Title
- Created levels for a cancelled UGC focused game. While the game was in development, I was a part of the first group of developers to use their toolset to create unique experience. This project was half design and half QA, as the foundational game was ever changing, and the limits of the toolkit was only theoretical. I also met with the client to discuss pain points, bugs, and feature requests.
Projects
- 10/2023 - PRESENT 5th Cataclysm
- 02/2022-09/2023 DCDB (Dungeon Crawler Deckbuilder)
Game Jam Submissions
Student Projects
- 01/2021 - 04/2021 Backwav
- 09/2020 - 12/2020 Binary Dreams
- 01/2020 - 04/2020 The Demoness of St. Valesky
- 09/2019 - 12/2020 Until You Wake
- 10/2019 - 12/2019 Night of Full Moons
- 09/2019 - 10/2019 Sand
- 01/2019 - 04/2019 Space Gate Ultra
- 09/2018 - 04/2019 Rush Park