Role: Systems / Technical Designer
Engine: Unity
Responsibilities:

• Card and encounter design

• Campaign content

• Gameplay balancing

• Designer-facing tools

• Cross-team collaboration

• Content implementation

Small team, big challenges

Working on The Lord of the Rings: Adventure Card Game remains one of the most meaningful experiences of my career. I have been a Tolkien fan since I was a child, so the opportunity to work on a project set in Middle-earth was something I never took for granted. Getting to contribute to such a beloved world was both exciting and intimidating, especially as someone early in my professional game development career.

Joining Fantasy Flight Interactive, and later continuing development with Antihero Studios, this became the project where I truly began finding my voice as a designer and as a professional in general. It was not just an opportunity to work on a major intellectual property; it was an opportunity to learn what kind of designer I wanted to become. I learned how to advocate for ideas, how to accept feedback, how to work within constraints, and perhaps most importantly, how to recognize that great designs rarely come from a single person working alone.

After graduating with my degree, seeing my name attached to a professional game studio was a surreal moment. It represented a transition from studying game design to actually being part of a team responsible for shipping a product. Looking back, it was one of those small milestones that felt much bigger than it appeared.

Learning to Build Across Distance

For most of development, we operated as a small but highly collaborative team. Our design team was based in Madison, Wisconsin, while our programming team worked remotely from Shanghai, China. This structure gave me valuable experience communicating across time zones, cultures, and working styles long before remote collaboration became the norm.

Those lessons became especially valuable during the COVID era, when many teams had to suddenly adapt to remote workflows. While our setup certainly came with challenges, communication gaps, scheduling difficulties, and the occasional "wait, which version are we talking about?" moment, it also taught me how much effective communication matters in development.

Good collaboration is not just about having meetings. It is about making sure everyone understands the goal, feels comfortable sharing ideas, and knows how their work connects to the larger vision of the project.

Finding My Place as a Designer

One of the things I appreciated most about our studio environment was how open and collaborative the design process was. Even as a newer designer, I was encouraged to contribute ideas, ask questions, and experiment. At the same time, I had access to experienced developers who challenged my assumptions and helped me refine my thinking.

This balance was incredibly valuable. I had room to explore ideas, but I also had regular opportunities to sit down with the producer and studio leadership to make sure our designs aligned with the goals of the project.

It taught me an important lesson that I still carry with me today: creativity works best when it has direction. Constraints are not always obstacles, they are often what help turn interesting ideas into finished products.

Balancing Vision, Feedback, and Reality

Like any development project, The Lord of the Rings: Adventure Card Game faced its share of challenges. From the business side, we navigated shifting deadlines, changing priorities, and new feature requests that required us to constantly evaluate where our time and resources were best spent.

From the player side, we had the challenge of creating a digital adaptation of a beloved tabletop game. The original tabletop experience had a passionate community, and many players understandably hoped for a direct translation of that experience into a digital format. However, creating a successful digital game meant making choices that took advantage of what the medium could offer.

Finding the balance between honoring the original game, respecting the expectations of existing fans, and creating something that worked as a standalone digital experience was one of the most interesting challenges of the project.

Our community was also one of the most rewarding parts of development. Positive feedback was incredibly motivating, especially when players connected with something I had helped create. At the same time, the community was not shy about pointing out mistakes, and honestly, that was valuable too. If a card interaction was confusing, unbalanced, or created an unintended experience, players often found it quickly.

That kind of feedback reinforced something I have always believed: good design requires humility. The goal is not to prove your idea was correct. The goal is to make the game better.

Designing Within Middle-earth

The content design side of the project was both challenging and rewarding. Every card, encounter, and campaign element had to balance gameplay needs with the expectations of the Lord of the Rings universe. Working within such a recognizable intellectual property required careful attention to consistency, tone, and detail.

Approvals through Tolkien/Middle-earth Enterprises meant that every piece of art and content had to align with the established world. This process taught me discipline as a designer. Sometimes the best design decision is not the most exciting idea you can imagine, it is the one that best supports the overall vision.

From a technical aspect, the project also gave me the opportunity to work with a custom Unity editor and visual scripting tools designed specifically for card creation. This system allowed designers to contribute more directly to content creation without requiring every change to go through engineering.

At the time, this was a practical solution for our team's workflow and gave me valuable experience thinking about tools from a designer's perspective. I also expanded my Python knowledge while working with these systems. Looking back, there are certainly things I would approach differently today, particularly around editor architecture and flexibility, but that reflection is part of what makes the experience valuable. Understanding why decisions were made with the information available at the time is a major part of good development.

Looking Back

The Lord of the Rings: Adventure Card Game was a formative project for me. As the primary designer responsible for much of the content, it gave me my first opportunity to contribute meaningfully to a shipped title and taught me lessons I continue to use today.

More than anything, it showed me that game development is a combination of creativity, communication, problem-solving, and adaptability. Great games are not created by perfect ideas appearing fully formed—they are built through iteration, discussion, compromise, and countless small improvements.

I am incredibly grateful to have been part of that process, and I hope future projects continue to provide the same opportunities to learn, collaborate, and create experiences that players enjoy.