Eric (E.J.) Nelson
Designer | Programmer | Team Lead
Crafting Games. Leading Growth. Inspiring Teams.
About Me
For over 20 years, I have worked tirelessly to refine my craft, leveraging technical expertise with creativity to ship blockbuster games with a high quality bar, while mentoring the newer generation of designers in best practices.
My career has taken a more technical journey, initially starting in open world content design and implementation and team leadership, to eventually transitioning to engineering roles with the intent on becoming a Technical Designer. Over time, I made my way into leadership positions, leading multiple teams across multiple projects, including serving in a director capacity.
Processes, at a glance
| Game Design | Programming | Leadership |
|---|---|---|
| For any design capacity as an individual contributor, my focus is always on player experience, regardless of the original design owner. Implement, play, iterate, coordinate playtests with others, gather feedback, iterate, polish, repeat until “Is this fun?” is answered with a resounding “Yes.” | Engineering roles have positioned me into a unique position to leverage my design skills by creating well thought out design documents, outlining the expected flow of the system being implemented. Once the pseudo-code has been established, actual implementation begins. Rapid implementation, with heavy debugging use, and constant testing along the way, ensures quality implementation. | “Lead from the trenches” is my approach. As a lead, I keep track of my team’s productivity on a daily basis, and coordinate daily to ensure that any roadblocks are properly handled in order to keep the team running smoothly. I will also take on individual contributor tasks in order to alleviate the burden on my team, and shield the team from unnecessary time sinks. |
Eric Nelson | Portfolio 