Zara “Gearhook” Berry
Game Designer, Card Gamer, Very Small Goblin
About Me
My name is Zara Berry. I am a woman with more than 14 years’ experience in making video games, and 6 years worth for designing them. My tastes, like my skillset, is widely diverse. I have worked on Mobile Games, Fighting Games, Strategy Games, Live Service Games, and even Tabletop Games. In my personal life I play and digest even more than that. My personal philosophy is that designing games is the most modern take on being a Toymaker. It is my opinion that my goal should always be to create an experience that delights the player- games that strives to become someone’s new favorite thing. That is my motivation and my unique perspective allows me to do that.
Spirit Bonds
I was the only game designer on League’s first Meta-game experience. We lacked experience in how to bring to life experiences that were exciting to players between games of league without detracting from the primary goal: Playing more games of League of Legends. With that in mind, my solution was straightforward. We set out to make a story-driven experience that specifically did not reduce the amount of time players were focused on League of Legends. To accomplish this my design focused on having it react to how players played League of Legends itself. If you carried a game particularly well, Yasuo would grow in bond with you. If you excelled in playing for map objectives then Lillia would grow in bond with you at an accelerated rate. The strongest aspect of this is that it was not singular. My design evaluated the results of each game and acted as a personality test. Bond would grow for each character at varying rates for different players completely tailored to how they played. Players got the entire story by playing the game, but the sequence the got it in- and which characters were most fond of them- was a measure of their own behaviors and habits. It was wildly successful, and set the groundwork for Metagame experiences long after I left the team.
Galaxies 2020
Again, I was the only designer on this event for League of Legends. Galaxies was a smaller event to see how we could leverage learnings from Spirit Bonds to make a narratively engaging event that players felt driven to participate in. So again, I looked at what we had available as well as what we could do without detracting or distracting from the primary goal of having our players enjoy the main game. The core design I came away with was a Versus-style event. Players were able to choose a side in the conflict: Duty or Ambition. This represented a diverging fate facing Cosmic Lux in the Galaxies universe. As players completed missions and played games- participated in League of Legends- they contributed a rating to their faction. At the end of the event, the winning faction was the fate that would befall Lux. Subsequently, Ambition won. Collaborating with Michael Yichao, the follow-up story Ambition’s Embrace was created and added to the League Universe from my design, and the players’ influence.
FEPR (Riftbound Rules)
I designed the concept of FEPR for Riftbound: Finalize, Execute, Pass, Resolve. It is the sequence of understanding and processing items on our chain. Players Finalize items on the Chain, then they can Execute actions that are available given the current game status, then priority passes if nothing has changed, then the chain is Resolved. It is a handy mnemonic (also of my creation) that has served to help organize player thinking in a game medium that does not have software to mediate out the complexities of a competitive game. “FEPRing the chain” is now a common device players use to solve their own problems and teach newcomers the game.
Riftbound: Origins
My work on the inaugural set of Riftbound was broad. I worked on the initial design, iteration, and balance of many of the individual cards and archetypes that made it to final print. However among them two archetypes stand out as primarily my responsibility in design: Sett and Jinx. I was responsible for creating their play patterns that evoke their League fantasies in an entirely new medium. For Jinx it is a discard archetype: Unloading your hand and “Reloading the Cylinder” to keep going. She gains benefits for having an empty hand and discarding cards prematurely. Sett, meanwhile, is The Boss and uses the Buffs system I designed to be a bully while controlling space. These archetypes have delighted players in how they evoke their League counterparts, and serve as strong backboards to learn the game.
