Squad
Lead Game Designer
Offworld Industries | PC | Realistic Tactical FPS | 2020–Present
Overview
A large-scale, team-based tactical FPS emphasizing communication, coordination, and combined arms warfare. I joined post-release as Lead Game Designer and have since overseen major gameplay overhauls, new feature development, and the long-term evolution of Squad’s core experience.
My Impact
Structured Cross-Disciplinary Teams:
Introduced a structured team ownership model alongside the Project Lead, shifting from a disorganized, “everyone works on everything” model to dedicated cross-disciplinary pods. Each team was aligned around specific gameplay areas and staffed with designers, artists, engineers, and QA who had both passion and aptitude for their domain.Established a Scalable Design Process:
Co-developed and rolled out a formal design process with the Head of Design to clarify how features were proposed, reviewed, and implemented. This framework became the studio-wide standard, improving stakeholder communication and ensuring design goals were tracked from concept to release.Post-Launch Design Leadership:
Took ownership of Squad's design direction following its initial release, ensuring ongoing updates and new features aligned with the game's pillars of realism, teamwork, and tactical depth.
Balanced long-term vision with short-term needs, maintaining gameplay identity while modernizing systems.Major Feature Updates:
Led the design of several significant updates, including the Infantry Combat Overhaul (ICO)—a complete rework of pacing, gunplay, and player survivability.
Directed new feature development such as game mode variants, deployable systems, environmental interaction mechanics, and faction balance adjustments.Gameplay Systems Iteration:
Regularly tuned and evolved core systems—weapon handling, movement, vehicles, commander abilities, logistics, and construction—based on community feedback, telemetry data, and team input.
Balanced systems for public play, competitive events, and new player accessibility.Team & Community Collaboration:
Coordinated with cross-functional departments (engineering, art, production, QA) to scope and implement features across multiple updates.
Built collaborative workflows with community stakeholders and modding teams, fostering transparency and player trust.Live Product Stewardship:
Contributed to high-level product strategy, feature roadmapping, and prioritization under resource constraints.
Supported live operations with regular hotfixes, meta rebalancing, and quality-of-life improvements.
Highlights
Led design direction for multiple years post-launch, growing Squad into a more accessible yet still tactically rich experience.
Delivered foundational overhauls like ICO, praised for improving the pacing and readability of infantry combat.
Helped evolve Squad into a leading example of authentic military simulation in the FPS genre, with a passionate and engaged player base.
Welcome to Squad Video
This wasn’t the first feature I worked on as Lead Designer but I figured it’s a good place to start if you aren’t familiar with Squad!
I drove the initiative to revamp our ‘what is squad?’ video, and to have it play for players on their first launch of the game. I coordinated with project leadership, the outsourcer we engaged, as well as marketing to ensure that it could be used for their purposes.
From the design side, we wanted to use this as an opportunity to better set expectations for new players who may not be familiar with how Squad is different compared to your typical military first-person shooter game.
Infantry Combat Overhaul
The infantry combat overhaul was one of the first large features/iterations that we undertook after becoming lead designer on Squad. It was an ambitious rework of the base infantry mechanics within the game.
Due to a lack of strong design leadership in previous years, the mechanics for the infantry player developed into something more akin to a twitch or e-sports shooter, completely focusing on individual play or hero fantasy - pretty much antithetical to the experience that Squad was supposed to be delivering on.
In addition, it made the multiplayer experience extremely harsh for newer players who were trying to learn the game. They were constantly getting killed by extremely experienced players while they were still trying to figure out which direction the enemy was attacking from.
The goals for the Infantry Combat Overhaul were to:
Increase the amount of teamwork required to win a firefight
Create pros & cons for various optics (ex: iron sights vs. red dot vs. magnified optic)
Create pros & cons for various weapons (ex: rifle vs marksman rifle vs machinegun)
Limit changes to the extent that the gameplay space does not require reconfiguration (ex: minimal impact on level design)
Approachable and engaging for new and veteran players alike
Mitigate Punishment for players who make mistakes
The design points for accomplishing the goals were many, and detailed, but to give a broad overview:
Gunplay iteration
Mitigate punishment on players who are caught in a bad position by making it less likely, under a majority of circumstances, that an opponent can quickly acquire their target and shoot with perfect accuracy.
Reward thoughtful, coordinated play. Make the player more dependent on squadmates and less of a one-man army. Mitigate the effectiveness of lone wolfing, and run-and-gunning.
Give each weapon a niche, and help each kit and faction play differently with tradeoffs/pros & cons.
Play and feel more like a soldier, less like superman.
Polish basic shooter elements which are old/outdated, or feel unfinished.
Improve presentation and immersion, add tradeoffs to magnified optics, and raise the quality bar to modern shooter standards. Make the player feel like they are looking through a scope, and not just zooming in the camera.
Suppression System
Make suppression a core gameplay mechanic, giving more purpose to MGs and suppressive fire.
Provide a tactically advantageous tradeoff when missing a shot on an enemy
Mitigate the punishment for a player who is in a bad position and shot at (instead of instantly dying from the extremely accurate enemy fire).
Character Movement Iteration
Encourage players to stay closer together as open ground, urban areas, and chokepoints become more significant tactical problems that require teamwork to overcome.
Create opportunities to stop and think by rewarding regular stamina breaks, making exhaustion more punishing and stamina management easier.
Give coordinated groups of players time to react and advantage when it comes to dealing with Lonewolf run-and-gun players
Prevent Lonewolfs from negating environmental obstacles. Remove ninja moves from the list of options to win a fight.
Part of the decision to undertake this effort was that we wanted to continue to build on Squad for years to come. In order to do this effectively, we needed to make these corrections to the foundation of the game.
We took an iterative approach to the design, which caused some friction on the team as targets would sometimes move, but it was necessary to ensure that we got these mechanics right, or it could have a significant, detrimental effect to the game.
We playtested these changes for months. We even broke our playtest app record CCUs by a large margin.
Ultimately we released the feature at what I would have called 90% complete - there was still some configuration that was a bit too punishing for the player (especially light and medium machinegun handling), or how quickly sight pictures were lost when moving. Both of these and more were addressed over time with balancing passes and iterations in subsequent releases.
We knew the reception would ultimately be polarizing among the community, especially since we had this entrenched group of hardcore/competition-based communities both in our player community and within the development team, which recoiled at anything that stopped them from playing the game like an e-sports shooter. We did suffer review bombs and brigading around this time but we recovered over time and the players who truly appreciate Squad for the immersive, teamwork-oriented tactical shooter that it is welcomed it with open arms.
We saw noticeable increase in all metrics including sales, retention, DAU, MAU, and CCU - hitting our all-time peak a few months later during the summer sale (and then breaking it again during a free weekend a year after ICO’s release) and setting a trend for growth that would see our average daily players never dropping below 10 000 (at time of writing).
Despite all of the challenges the team faced with developing and releasing this feature, I’m proud of what we accomplished as we corrected the foundation for Squad that we can continue to build on for hopefully another decade.
End of Round Voting
The End of Round Voting feature was the next large feature we worked on for Squad, and one that I owned more directly.
We had several goals and problems to solve:
Increase visibility of content to players - at this point in Squad, we had 13 faction and roughly 20 maps, but there was really nowhere in the game where a new player would see this. Through the voting system, we were hoping to expose new players to how much content the vanilla game offered, in hopes of increasing retention and reducing refund rates
Increase player agency - before this, it was entirely up to the server community to set a ‘rotation’ (prescribed list) of ‘gameplay layers’ (combination of map, game mode, faction, and vehicle layout)
Increase variety - prior to this, every unique faction match-up (ex: USA vs Russia) required its own gameplay layer to be created by designers. With 13 factions in the game, this meant that for every combination of map, game mode, and potential faction match-up, we would need roughly ~60 gameplay layers. Thus, players only had access to a small number of possible gameplay layers. By making the selection of faction modular, we were able to reduce this down to a single gameplay layer. This resulted in a smaller download size for the game, and much less manual labor on the designers.
On top of this, we implemented ‘units’ (later renamed to ‘battlegroups’) which adjusted the vehicle and role layout of a faction to suit a particular playstyle - armored, mechanized, motorized, light infantry, air assault, combined arms, and support
Work began as many features do - as terrible google drawings that are quickly concepted over to look nicer.
The bulk of the work was cleaning up the data assets - reducing the number of gameplay layers and configuring the remaining ones to use the voting system - which as one of the designers who struggled with the old gameplay layer system I was only too happy to take on myself.
Ultimately we were able to reduce 453 gameplay layers down to 203 (but containing every possible faction matchup for that map’s biome).
Ultimately, the feature was a success, with most server communities adopting the voting system instead of the old ‘rotation’ method.
We could have improved the configuration limits we provided for server communities - they could determine how many voting options players would see, how long they would have to vote, how long before a selected option would appear again in voting options, etc. We felt like we gave them too much freedom on these and outside of a few server communities who dove in to understand the full depth and flexibility of the system - most only adjusted a few settings which created some issues like specific maps or factions not appearing or being selected very often which created a perception that the voting system killed off certain content.
After Action Report
The After Action Report was a feature we worked on and released in 2024.
A big problem we had in the core loop of Squad is that players would be engaged and playing a round of gameplay, and then suddenly it would end.
Players often didn’t have visibility on the overall round from the team’s perspective—with 100 players fighting across a 4x4km map, everyone only left with a piece of the story, and there wasn’t adequate feedback to indicate what their team did well, could improve on, or what ultimately led to the conclusion of the game.
The main goals with the feature were to:
Close the Game Loop - Give players more tangible feedback and provide an informative After Action Report screen so that players can learn and adapt to their team’s current strengths and weaknesses. In such a large-scale game, players often do not see the whole picture during a round of gameplay as to the reasons for their team’s successes or failures.
Provide summarized information on each team’s ticket losses and gains for the round
Provide a timeline/time stamp context for each team’s ticket losses and gains throughout the duration of the round
Provide information/time stamp context on a team’s logistics effort
Information should be universally relevant for any game mode (so that separate versions of this screen are not needed for each game mode)
Provide Analytics Data - Provide analytics data for design to look at to get insight into balancing and gameplay adjustments. These will be filled out in more detail during the design phase in the analytics section as we’ll need useful ways to collect & parse the data.
Initially it was my intent to delegate this feature to a senior designer, but eventually took more direct ownership and worked with our senior engineer to implement this feature, the relevant screens, and the corresponding analytics.
We went through several iterations of layout and deciding what information to show to players.
Overall the feature went quite smoothly compared to others, there were a few stretch goals that we didn’t reach but overall we accomplished the goals we set out with.