Gretchen Carlson
Website: http://gcarlson.ragnarok-studios.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gretchencarlson0451/
SUMMARY
Collaborative gameplay generalist who emphasizes team-friendly practices in documentation, architecture, and iteration tools, with nearly a decade of experience including multiplayer development, C++, and Unreal Engine.
GAMEPLAY
• Prototyped and implemented player abilities, enemy abilities, and boss fights for single player, multiplayer, first person, and third person gameplay, across multiple engines.
• Implemented gameplay systems to support narrative progression and outer loop features, including long-term changes to the player’s abilities and changes to game mechanics resulting from the player’s decisions.
• Shepherded a system for game-changing enemy abilities through a highly iterative design process, including systemically detecting good opportunities for those special abilities to occur, and eventually allowing designers to author occurrences.
• Created perks, upgrades and abilities for players and enemies that altered gameplay at runtime, sometimes turning existing abilities into completely different abilities, all multiplayer-compliant.
• Implemented smart objects for character interactions while gracefully handling multiple overlapping gameplay systems.
• Designed and coded a utility AI to play boardgame-style games, iterating until internal and external playtests were positive.
• Implemented opt-in risk/reward run modifiers for replayability in roguelite gameplay.
• Designed and scripted a progress tracking feature that allowed players to peruse all rule variations ever encountered.
• Designed and implemented achievements and unlocks.
• Created NPCs that dynamically swap their behavior trees and locomotion animations to behave completely differently based on player actions (personal project—not a shipping game).
SYSTEMS
• Designed and coded a system for designers to create boardgame-style maps with connected nodes, and the base classes and behavior for each of the gameplay features that could spawn at those nodes.
• Created a system for designers to define runtime changes to the game’s rules and allow AI to trigger those changes.
• Designed and implemented a “scare director” to manage the appearance and pacing of ambient scare events.
• Created a system for authoring patrol paths and corresponding AI patrol behavior (personal project—not a shipping game).
• Created a perception system to manage AIs’ awareness of players through becoming suspicious, fully aware and aggressive, and forgetting their suspicion (personal project—not a shipping game).
• Created a music system to allow external audio implementors to manipulate music according to gameplay changes.
• Implemented Steam achievements and a system to allow designers to easily add their own.
OTHER
• Consistently received fewer bugs from QA than my peers due to stable code and scripting.
• Designed and implemented an automated testing tool that revealed multiple serious bugs that had evaded manual testing.
• Reduced the entire team’s bugfixing burdens by advocating for and gaining widespread adoption of UE5’s random streams whenever random numbers needed to be generated, allowing us to easily reproduce extremely rare RNG bugs.
• Provided cheats, test maps, debug functionality and documentation to allow all departments to work more efficiently.
• Provided support and documentation to external codev studios.
• Performed live NPC interactions with players in The Blackout Club.
• Taught thousands of martial arts classes through empathy, clear communication, mutual trust, and effective mentorship.
• Wrote code in C++ for the Electronic Database of White Dwarf Stars, funded by NASA.
GAME DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE
Programmer – Unannounced Project – Strange Scaffold, remote (Jun. 2026 – present)
Technical Designer / Gameplay Engineer – The Killing Stone (UE5) – Question, remote (Jan. 2024 – Mar. 2026)
Systems Designer – South Park: Snow Day! (UE4) – Question, remote (Sept. 2021 – Jan. 2024)
Scripter (contract) – Prey 2 – Human Head, Madison (Jul. 2011 – Oct. 2011)
Software Engineer – Quake 4 / Wolfenstein / Singularity – Activision-Blizzard, Madison (Jan. 2005 – Apr. 2008)
Object Engineer – Sims 2 – Electronic Arts, Redwood City (Jun. 2003 – Sept. 2004)
Game Event Specialist – Legends of Wrestling II – Acclaim Studios, Salt Lake City (Aug. 2002 – Dec. 2002)
EDUCATION
Bachelor of Science, Space Sciences, Florida Tech, Melbourne