Classic stories with heroes, villains, gods, and monsters spanning across timelines, pantheons, and dimensions crafting unique, gripping, and fun high-stakes adventures!
• Fantasy-fulling quests & instances for heroes and villains
• Unique settings, varied sidekicks, and tons of easter eggs
• Optimizing to min-max the fun
Always with the focus, “Who will players want to be, who will players want to see, and are there any good tie-ins?” Writing for DCUO was always a question of focus and precision, all in service of fun, empowering, and popular player experience to create...
•2 New & Updated Events
•50+ Event Reward theme packs
•1 Revamped Start-of-Game Tutorial
Narrative Design
Story supports gameplay in this trial-by-fire tutorial!
Story Writing
The scattered (and scatter-brained) Justice League Dark have to set aside their shenanigans to fight this threat against magic everywhere!
Plenty of twists and turns when dealing with villains and devils in this radio-drama themed adventure!
Dialogue Editing
Highly requested cross-over between Static, Icon & Rocket, and the Teen Titans! Written by Leon Chills and edited by me.
That’s in addition to:
Dark Knights, Wonderverse, Long Live the Legion, 10 Year Anniversary, House of Legends, World of Flashpoint, Legion of Doom, Homecoming, and Brainiac Returns!
System Design: Naming
•Thematic
•Short
When it came to naming, I first prioritized understanding: should it reference an item class, player-facing purpose, or naming schema? If not, how can I best communicate its use?
After that, I’d make sure that the name felt thematic, tying it to a region, character, or larger lore. Then I’d consider ways to shorten the name: a kindness for English, but necessary for many non-English translations.
Here are some magic-themed upgrades for the Egyptian-themed The Sins of Black Adam and the Hecate-themed Justice League Dark: Cursed.
Thematic, linked, and relatively short.
| Boon of Horus |  |
Maiden’s Waxing Magic |  |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boon of Anubis |  |
Mother's Full Love |  |
| Boon of Sobek |  |
Crone's Waning Patience |  |
Because finding Collection Items is a challenge where the names themselves become a fun part of reward, I went a little longer in some their descriptions.
| Legion of Doom Merch | DeSaad's Materials | Teen Titans Pet Club |
|---|---|---|
| “Available via mail order from a very shady source.” | "The science of suffering." | "First rule of Pet Club is to tell everyone about Pet Club!" |
| Riddler's NFT Encryption
Bane's Protein Powder Gorilla Grodd's Mind Boosting App Bizzaro's "Rare" Misprint Collection Captain Cold's Novelty Ice Tray Giganta's Multi-Level Scheme Cheetah's "Historic" Replicas Catwoman's Lockpicking Kit Black Manta's Survival Kit Luthor's Motivational Tapes Perpetua's Promise |
Toxicillin
Hateamine Spitic Acid Malignether Loathatal Vendettium Bitteride Horroxide Sinergy Effluvia Fomented Misery Virulent Despair |
Terra's Pet Rock
Ace's Ball-thrower Streaky's Scratching Post Spot's Shrinking Suit Bat Cow's Salt Lick Blue Beetle's Bug Farm Hoppy's Carrot Cache Beast Boy's Chameleon Terrarium Raven's Corvid Parade Silky's Molted Exoskeleton F.E.L.I.X. and M.A.X.'s Operating Manuals Aqualad's Tubular Fish Tank |
System Design: Descriptions
For description-based systems like Character Create, Abilities, or Artifacts, I focused the text to give players just enough info to quickly understand and choose between weapons, powers, and origin, while also removing any monetization pain points, all while improving flavor to boot.
• Confident Decisions
• More Fun & Flavor
| Original | Rework | |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
|
| Alignment | - | - |
| Mentor | Nonexistent field. No info on unique mentor quests*. |
Added field. Build excitement: unique mentor quests*! |
| Power | Abilities | No difficulty info. | Warning players: High Complexity. |
| Role | Abilities Role | Unclear what role means. Unclear what determines role. Unclear that all roles have Damage. "Control" is wrong term. |
Contextual info to explain role. Clarified what determines role. Added "Damage | " to every role. Fixed to "Controller". |
| Combat | Weapon | No difficulty info. "Combat" is wrong term. "Brawler" is wrong term. Separated from Abilities. |
No warning needed: Brawling is easy. Fixed to "Weapon". Fixed to "Brawling". Moved below Abilities. |
| Movement | Not obvious how much flying makes vertical exploration easier. | Added "Versatile" & "Ground-Based" to highlight advantages of Flight. |
| (Flavor Text) | Not that flavorful. Looks like mechanical info. Typo. |
More exciting! Italicized to indicate flavor text. Fixed typo. |
| (FYI) | Players might think quick create options are locked in. | Lets players know they can modify quick create options. |
*Unique Mentor Quests: Players couldn’t intuitively know that their “Origin” of “Tech/Magic/Meta” would influence whether they’d get Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Joker, Lex Luthor, or Circe starter missions. Changing one field description was an easy win in creating excitement and anticipation.
System Design: Overhauling Feats
As a year-long background project, I reorganized categories to be top-down by priority, to eliminate overflow, and to convey info faster.
• Easier to Maintain
• Consistent & Optimized Text Formatting
• Encouraged Monetization
A quick look: top-level reorganization helps funnel players towards desired categories:
Example: The original “Alerts” section hadn’t been updated since the launch game, because new Alert Feats were lumped in with their episodes: easy for designer and sensible for players. So I eliminated the old “Alerts” section, moved the launch game Alerts into a launch game section ("Classic"), and made episode Alert Feats easier to find with consistent icons and placement.
To prioritize pertinent information, I removed repeated text and standardized formatting order to convey info from broad-to-specific. This example demonstrates both the cleaner format and what info appears "above-the-fold" in the UI:
Name
Location (Difficulty): [Defeat|Complete] [Boss|Task] [under parameters]
+no punctuation
+consistent key phrases
+using string token names
Changing the wordy...
Stone Breaker
In the Wonderverse: Fractured God Sphere Raid (Normal Only), defeat all of the Effigy statues in under 2 minutes during the Zeus fight
...into...
Stone Breaker
Fractured God Sphere Raid (Normal): Defeat Zeus after destroying every Awakened Effigy in under 2 minutes
Short, clean, and accurate.
In addition to organizational and formatting issues, Feat icons themselves were just as jumbled and inconsistent.
Example: Some categories got so large and disorganized that finding a specific Feat within it could be tricky, like this power stance icon used in both itemization and boss fight mechanics (two very different areas of gameplay).
While my full documentation was more thorough, this quick primer shows my improved delineation for icon categories:
See what players had to say about this update in the test server:
"YES YES YES!!! this was needed so badly. always appreciate these quality of life changes"
- Drathmor
"Honestly I wanted something like that for so long, it kind of sorted like the achievements in Guild Wars 2 and I really love that. I need to take a better look at this but I love what I am seeing so far. I am really looking forward to use it on the live servers"
- Eve
"Thank you.. Thank you..Thank you!!!!!!"
- Tabula Rasa
"I love this so much it needs work but my goodness it's enough to make you cry or it could be my damn allergies. I also loveee how now the most recent episodes will now start at top instead of the bottom."
- FlawlessTime
I loved getting to unleash the hero in us all with DC Universe Online. Onto the next adventure!