The Walking Dead: 400 Days

Role
Cinematic Artist

Release
July 2, 2013

Responsibilities
Cinematic Design
Level Design
Gameplay Scripting (LUA)

Selected Work

400 Days was our sandbox to push the adventure genre forward—testing bold interaction ideas and stress-testing Telltale’s engine. I led rapid prototypes in Lua inside the proprietary Telltale Tool, then partnered with design, animation, and cinematics to harden the best ideas for production.

Role highlights

• Built and iterated original mechanics (Lua + Telltale Tool) from pitch → playable prototype → shipped content.

• Focused on responsiveness and readability: tighter cameras, clearer player intent, more natural animation.

• Prototypes here informed later action and stealth sequences in The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands.

Corn Maze

We adapted the tiling technique we’d used in The Walking Dead for moving vehicles into a player-responsive system. In the corn maze, the world tiles scroll relative to Bonnie so she can move left, right, or sprint forward (technically forever) while enemies spawn at semi-random offsets to her position. A collision with the enemy's flashlight cone triggers a fail state. This let us deliver tense, low-visibility navigation without heavy level authoring, while keeping moment-to-moment control firmly in the player’s hands.

You can check out a video of it, here:

Stealth Gameplay

I also helped build this stealth sequence, evolving controlled-movement work I’d done on The Walking Dead. The goal was to push for snappier input and responsive cameras and animation to alleviate some of the stiffness of the earlier Walking Dead sequences.

Shipping this suite of QTEs and controlled-movement scenes gave us a proven toolkit we later scaled for The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands.