Nathaniel Chapman, Game Designer
Hi! I’ve been a game developer working in the industry since 2003 as a QA Tester, Producer, Designer, and Lead throughout my career. I also play guitar, love travelling, have an extremely cute Japanese Akita named Akina, and have been learning Japanese on and off for many years.
I love games and am passionate about their potential; not just as a way to chill out or a hobby, but for their ability to teach us about the world, to make us see people and situations from a different perspective, and to show us how the world could be a better place.
I believe that the best way to make games is for creative, passionate people to work together and to really share ownership of their work - both financial and creative, and am working to build the kind of studio where people can share that ownership and work together to make something better and more meaningful than they could otherwise.
Career Timeline
2003
Over my sophomore year summer break from college, I got a job as a QA contractor with Activision. That summer I tested Raven Software’s Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy and Stainless Steel Studios’ Empires: Dawn of the Modern World.
2004
In the summer vacation from my Junior year, I returned to Activision as a QA Contractor on X-Men Legends. This is the first console game I worked on and the first time I had to deal with TRC/TCR checklists for a console game.
2005
After graduating from college, I was hired as Obsidian Entertainment’s first in-house QA Tester. I worked on Neverwinter Nights 2, initially managing the team of 3 production testers who worked directly with the development team, and then leading the larger team of temporary QA hires. Near the end of the project, a vacancy opened up for an Assistant Producer position, and I shifted into that role dealing with bug triage and assignment, as well as some UI design and implementation.
2006
Once NWN2 shipped, I continued as a producer on patches, working with the community to help resolve some modability issues with NWN2 when compared to the original NWN. Once development spun up on Mask of the Betrayer, I moved over to production on it, helping manage tasks, doing PR, tradeshows, and additionally continuing to assist with UI and control scheme design.
2007
Early after we shipped Mask of the Betrayer, I finished up designs for the camera revisions in an early patch. At that point, I made a lateral shift full-time into game design on Storm of Zehir. On SoZ I did many of the area designs in the Sword Coast section of the game, as well as the technical design and implementation of the Overworld Map, Crafting and Trading systems.
2008
After Storm of Zehir, I transitioned into System Design on the Aliens RPG, which unfortunately was not released. However, during my time on the project I helped define the RPG systems, refined the control scheme for commanding companions, and tuned weapons and enemy health and behaviors.
2009
I played guitar on “Home on the Wastes”, a track on the Fallout: New Vegas soundtrack sung by the lovely Josh Sawyer.
After the Aliens RPG, I started working in System Design on the newly launched Dungeon Siege 3 project. I led the development strike team for the combat, ability, and RPG systems. Partway through development I became Lead Designer and helped oversee scoping, communication with other departments, and ensuring that design remained on schedule and had the tools they needed to successfully ship the game on time. In addition, I designed and implemented two of the four character’s abilities, the item generation and RPG systems, and implemented the RPG formulas and abilities in C++ code. I also did PR and press, and appeared on a G4TV segment discussing the game.
2011
Led a strike team designing and implementing player combat, animations and enemy AI animation and behavior for an unreleased third-person Action RPG.
2012
I was hired as a Quest Designer at Blizzard on the World of Warcraft team. I contributed several quests to the Kun-Lai Summit zone, including the zone finale quest line. I also made many of the Shado-Pan daily quests and the finale quest for the Shado-Pan faction. I contributed several quests and a scenario to the patches, and designed the outdoor world bosses for the Battlefield: Barrens event.
In the final patch for Mists of Pandaria, I moved to the Encounter Design team for the Siege of Orgrimmar raid, where I designed and implemented the Siegecrafter Blackfuse encounter.
2014
During the Warlords of Draenor expansion, I designed and implemented the Tectus, Iron Maidens, Socrethar and Xhul’horac raid encounters, oversaw the Auchindoun dungeon, including designing and implementing the Azzakel and Teron’gor encounters, and designed and implemented the scripting and data framework for Garrison Invasions and the Garrison Invasion summonable bosses.
2016
On Legion, I designed and implemented the Il’gynoth, Star Augur Etraeus, Kil’jaeden and Argus raid encounters, the Black Rook Hold dungeon. In Return to Karazhan, I designed the Maiden of Virtue encounter and much of the flavor spawning, including the timed run for Nightbane (though not the encounter itself). I also implemented creature abilities for many of the Artifact questlines.
2018
For Battle for Azeroth, I designed and implemented the Fetid Devourer, Zul, and Opulence raid encounters, the Kings’ Rest dungeon, and helped develop and implement a gamewide scaling and tuning project across all of WoW’s available content.
2019
In February of 2019 I left Blizzard to strike out on my own and explore new ways of developing games; particularly with more democratic modes of ownership and control. I’m excited to share this with everyone in the future!
World of Warcraft Encounter Design Notes
As an Encounter Designer, I handled creature and spell design and implementation for the outdoor world, raid and dungeon encounter pacing, tuning and implementation, outdoor world, dungeon, and raid spawning and enemy behaviors, among other miscellaneous tasks. For any specific content listed for World of Warcraft, I did not contribute art assets or code, both which were done by the fantastic artists and engineers of the World of Warcraft team. Additionally, the WoW Encounter team constantly shares ideas, implementation help, feedback and more with each other, and their contributions were invaluable to the content that I developed while I was an Encounter Designer. Finally, for all raids specified, I designed, implemented and tuned all available difficulties of the raid encounter, however I did not handle design or tuning of Mythic+ difficulties in dungeons.