Chris Justo

Principal Systems Designer
Return to Home

Resume

SUMMARY

Principal Systems designer with 6 years of MMORPG design experience. Specializing in complex progression, economy, and social systems. Led and cross disciplinary team that grew from 3 to 31 contributors leading up to a Steam Early Access launch with a peak of 30K+ concurrent users. Experienced in feature ownership from concept through live operations, leveraging telemetry, player feedback, and stakeholder collaboration to drive engagement and retention.

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY

Intrepid Studios - Ashes of Creation

Principal Systems Designer [Jan 2025 - Feb 2026]

  • Led the onboarding and progression overhaul for the Steam Early Access launch,introducing the destiny board system to provide players with long term goals and improve early game retention. 

  • Designed and implemented blacklisting tools with Engineering and QA, giving the live operations team the ability to disable problematic data without new deployed builds.

  • Orchestrated weekly playtests on the public test realms, leveraging telemetry and feedback from hundreds of players to iterate on progression, crafting, and itemization prior to the Steam Early Access launch.

  • Conducted bi-weekly one-on-ones with a design team of 6 designers working on the systems team, providing feedback, direction, and mentorship.

  • Managed the merger of the systems and economy team consisting of 31 contributors to improve collaboration, implementation, and standards leading up to the Steam Early Access launch.

Senior Systems Designer [Jan 2022 - Jan 2025]

  • Led a cross departmental team of engineers, designers, and artists, focusing on social, PvX, and dynamic city systems delivering engaging features core to the success of Ashes of Creation.

  • Partnered with directors and cross departmental leads to define and commit to quarterly milestone goals, targeting high impact retention and onboarding improvements with the core gameplay loop.

  • Owned the design and implementation of Ashes of Creation’s city node system, creating cooperation and conflict for thousands of players as they progressed the game world through the city node system during our Alpha 2 phase.

  • Designed and implemented the Node War system, which guilds used to compete over resources, territory, and political influence through large scale PvX events that created weeks of emergent gameplay.

  • Created balancing tools for managing node system experience and building management costs, allowing for precise effort to reward tuning.

Game Designer [Jan 2021 - Jan 2022]

  • Authored and presented dozens of design documents for Node Systems providing engineering concise requirements for feature development.

  • Coordinated a team of designers to deliver world population across 2 zones creating dynamic grind spots for Alpha 1 launch.

Junior Game Designer [Feb 2020 - Jan 2021]

  • Utilized Unreal Engine Blueprints and Behavior Trees to build world bosses for Ashes of Creation’s Alpha 1 launch.

  • Populated NPCs to create living city environments for players for Alpha 0 launch.

SKILLS

Cross-Disciplinary Leadership | MMORPG Systems Design | Feature Ownership | Documentation and Standards | Live Service | Player Data Analysis and Telemetry | Unreal Engine 5 | Unity | Godot | Excel | Google Sheets | SQL | C# | Communication and Stakeholder Alignment

Some of my Favorite Games

Every game has a lesson worth learning.

The expressive movement of Celeste and Tony Hawk, the simplicity of Portal and Super Hot, the storytelling of Mouthwashing and Skate Story, and the systemic depth of Path of Exile and Kenshi.

Each of these games have influenced the way I approach design.

Outside of Games

Making Music and Pixel Art, Drawing, watching Movies and Shows, reading Comics, Playing TCGs, and Skating.