Patrick Smedley

Game Designer

Hi there! I’m an experienced Game Designer & Design Leader with 8+ years of experience building great features and content for players. I have proven success leading cross-disciplinary teams in the MMO New World and in Amazon’s untitled Lord of the Rings MMO. My teams were responsible for delivering seasonal content updates, rapid gameplay prototyping, scalable design pipelines, and hundreds of engaging AI encounters across New World and other in-development titles. I’m passionate about empowering designers through tooling, fostering collaboration across disciplines, and creating engaging gameplay worlds where players feel every moment is special.

I’m looking for my next opportunity. Think I can contribute to your team? Please reach out to me and let’s chat!

Lord of the Rings MMO

Lead AI Designer (Oct. ‘24 - Oct. ‘25)

  • Led a team to deliver core gameplay for AI and combat in a sprawling online world.

  • Accelerated AI creation by 3x through strategic improvements to AI tooling and behavior pipelines, outperforming the team’s previous title.

  • Designed and implemented 22 AI characters for the playable demo, spanning combatants, companions, and ambient world actors.

  • Owned complex AI feature development, including multiplayer attack ticketing systems in a shared-world MMO environment.

  • Championed cross-discipline collaboration, enabling every developer to contribute meaningfully to AI Design via intuitive tooling and streamlined workflows.

  • Partnered with senior leadership to define a bold AI and gameplay vision, crafting a technical strategy supporting scalable, emergent world behavior across the MMO.

New World: Aeternum

Lead Seasons & Progression Designer/Product Owner (Sept. ‘22 - Oct. ‘24)

  • Led a 16-person and a 13-person multi-disciplinary teams to rapidly develop new features.

  • Owned designs for features and systems to support seasonal content, driving increased engagement, with 82% of DAU engaging in seasonal content.

  • Oversaw design and implementation of dozens of AI to support seasonal content.

  • Reviewed work of teammates and co-dev studios to ensure the features met milestone criteria and quality.

  • Collaborated with leaders across the org to set KPIs for success of seasonal feature set.

  • Directly managed and mentored a team of 5 designers, fostering growth and job satisfaction.

New World

AI Designer (June ‘19 - Sept. ‘22)

  • Led design and implementation of 100+ AI characters from conception through ship.

  • Utilized proprietary scripting tools to implement behaviors in an animation driven combat system.

  • Designed engaging bosses that mixed action combat with traditional MMO gameplay for fresh experiences.

  • Led cross-disciplinary teams to own and implement the design for new AI and systems.

  • Used data from player telemetry to fine tune AI encounters to meet the desired difficulty.