Portfolio of Matthew Stone

Ludare is a game platform that I created all the components of for my startup, Pathless Productions. The goal of Ludare was to create a new indie game subscription service that helps developers get their games to market sooner so they can raise funding to support their development. It does so by combining a library of complete and in development titles and splitting a user’s monthly fee amongst the games they played in a month based on their share of total monthly playtime.

The main ludare website is built utilize React running on a virtual linux machine in AWS. This website allows users to sign up for the platform as well as download the games in the library. The games that make up the library need to integrate a simplified plugin for their engine of choice (Unity, Unreal, Gadot) which provides them with a basic DRM load in scene that forces a user to login. Once logged in, playtime events are shared with our backend server every 5 minutes. The backend server is written with Node.JS and manages all the database queries and authentication for both the website and all games using our DRM.

As the CEO of Pathless productions, I built the entire technology stack, oversaw partner negotiations, ran our marketing program, and communicated with investors. Pathless also participated in the University of Michigan’s Desai accelerator as well as the inaugural cohort of the ShawneeXP Game Accelerator. So far, we have been able to grow Ludare to 8 game partnerships and over 110 registered users off limited resources and with just a team of 3.

Project Sentinel was a new studio founded by several experienced devs that I had worked with and their expanded networks. Our goal was to produce a new shooter game that could fulfill the gap in the market that used to be filled by party shooters such as Halo and Golden Eye. Our team produced a high-quality MVP in spring of 2023 that we then used to pitch to over 40 publishers and investors. We had a strong positive response to our MVP and pitch. However, we have struggled to find funding in large part due to ongoing issues in the economy. My roile on the project was as CEO, leading all business related efforts, as well as design and tech lead on the MVP.

Elder Scrolls Online is a 3rd person fantasy RPGMMO based in the Elder Scrolls universe and created by ZeniMax Online Studios. As a content designer on ESO, I am tasked with pitching quest content, maintaining quest vision during development, and preparing update content for launch. My first work as part of the ESO content team will ship with the High Isle content update.

Warframe is a free to play, online, 3rd person shooter that has been supported by Digital Extremes since it first launched in 2013. As a technical designer on Warframe, I was tasked with pitching, developing, and maintaining new activities. My first shipping work as part of the Warframe team was the Cracks in Deimos activity that launched with the Deimos: Arcana update in November of 2020.

Halo Infinite is the next game in the Halo franchise. I was brought on as a contract gameplay designer for the campaign team in January 2018. While on the team, I was tasked with making some of the tools and scripts to help other designers to create content quickly taking advantage of technology made by our engineers. I also worked with other designers to create gameplay experiences for our players. This includes scripting, layout, and encounters. Alongside this implementation, I worked with several leads and teams to write specs to share our desires with engineers and artists.

This was the project I was part of for my second ETC semester long project. This project was for the Alice Project inside of the ETC. The team was tasked with experimenting and documenting how to teach programming in a VR environment, namely the Google Daydream. We experimented using a combination of physical and digital prototypes that we tested with students at our program and at their schools. The prototypes were tested about once a week in schools with students taking programming classes. The final prototype was demonstrated to Eric Brown, the director of the Alice Project.

I was the lead producer and a designer for the project which required me to lead a team of 6 for 16 weeks both in terms of scheduling and adapting our design as we progressed through the semester and began testing. As a producer, I used techniques such as agile and scrum to plan and change the project as the semester progressed. I also had to help smooth out some team difficulties that arose due to communication issues and clashes of personalities. As a designer, I used physical prototyping and data collection to understand how students used our application and adapt our designs to get students to transform in the ways we wanted them to. Outside of these two roles, I helped with our Wwise Unity integration for our sound.

This was a project that I was a part of for my first ETC semester long project. This was a project for Legendary Entertainment. The team was tasked with experimenting the possibilities of location based mobile games, like Pokemon Go, using their proprietary GPS marker system, called Spatial. The way we experimented in this area was to develop a prototype application where users could physically move through their environments and destroy virtual representations of real buildings. For the prototype, the entire CMU campus was given custom assets to represent the buildings and other places were given a pool of general building assets to pull from. The final prototype was shown to several executives at Legendary who viewed our project and the insights we provided as valuable and helping them to understand where their platform can be useful.

I was the producer for the project and had to manage a 16 week schedule for a team of 6. This included setting up meetings with faculty instructors and our client; setting up schedules for the team and ensuring deadlines were hit by the team members; ensuring team members had the resources they needed; and communicating the project to the entire ETC faculty. As the producer, I used techniques such as scrum and RACI charts to organize our team and enforce opportunities for members to communicate. Outside of producing, I helped run our playtesting and provided some input on the overall design. I also wrote the image server for our system where we stored user photos so they could be shared to Facebook.

This was the last world I worked on for BVW. The team was given the CAVE platform and the prompt to make something for the ETC fall festival. The team decided to make a singing game since we felt that it would fun to get a group of guests singing together having fun. For this round, I did the improv acting and implemented the obstacles and rowing systems.

This game was one of 13 selected to represent the ETC at the festival. Despite some technical issues with PS Move on the night of the festival, all the guests that got to play enjoyed the experience.

This was the third world I worked on for BVW. In this round, my team was assigned the Jam-O-Drum platform and the prompt of making something in a week. My team decided to make a game where you steer with the wheel and pound on the drum to eat because we wanted to get our players hitting the drum quickly. In this round, I did all the sound work and helped to debug some of the coding issues our game had.

Most of the feedback we got was that people could only play one or two rounds before their arms got too tired and that players wanted more feedback when they were getting points. We didn't get the chance to incorporate some of this feedback because of the short timeframe. However, had we been given more time, we would have added some effects to show when players are getting points.

This was the second world that I helped create for BVW. We were assigned the Vive VR platform and had to create and experience that a naive guest could easily pickup and make 3 predictions about what they would do. For this reason, we decided to make a Superman game since we thought it would be easy for players to understand what they needed to do once they knew they were Superman.

Our Naive tester for this round did everything we expected them to. This included putting their arms out to fly, taking down robots, and destroying the UFO at the end. For this project, I worked on the sound design including the voice over to get the players to fly, the crushing noise when a robot is punched, and the background music. Outside sound design, I was the producer for the team meaning I helped the team plan out and keep on track our progress using agile and scrum during the 2 week time frame. I also helped to plan the overall experience design of flying practice to robots coming to you to you tracking down robots around the UFO and finally taking down the UFO.