Strider Toll

Game Designer & Developer

Hello! Thanks for visiting my portfolio.
I'm Strider, a designer, programmer, and all-around game maker based in southeast Michigan. In the past, I have worked at Team Vortex as a Unity Engineer for Rushdown Revolt. I love to make games that bring people together, for both casual fun and exciting competition.Interested in working with me? Check out my resume and send me an email!

• Email
• LinkedIn

• Resume

Rushdown Revolt - Team Vortex

Gameplay Designer, Unity Developer, & Technical Artist, Feb. 2020 - June 2023
Live-service platform fighting game for PC
- Partnered with team leads to design and iterate on core combat mechanics
- Designed and implemented movesets for two original characters
- Created and owned a system that assigned custom VFX to alternate skins
- Lead a team to create and implement new VFX for promotional skins
- Built and debugged online-ready code in a game with 300+ peak players

• Rushdown Revolt on Steam

Bucket of Bolts

Sole Developer, January 2022 - May 2022
Cooperative 2D platformer and space shoot 'em up
- Wrote systems for traversal across asteroids with individual fields of gravity
- Designed ship functions that share a control scheme with player characters
- Ran playtests and incorporated player feedback to improve accessibility
- Created a dynamic UI and camera system to track players that move offscreen
- Built custom shaders to recolor player characters

• Bucket of Bolts on Itch

Market Mayhem - Spartasoft Studio

Systems Designer, September 2023 - December 2023
Online multiplayer hide and seek game
- Designed player movement and combat abilities
- Worked with other designers to iterate on items and metagame systems
- Collaborated with programmers and animators to implement player abilities

• Market Mayhem on Itch

Boost Breakers

Sole Developer, October 2019 - July 2021
Competitive platform fighter
- Designed and balanced a character moveset around a theme of wild confidence
- Created system mechanics to incentivize stylish, high-risk high-reward gameplay
- Developed movement and combo systems inspired by anime fighters
- Extended the functionality of Unity's animation Editor

• Boost Breakers Design Notes

Blast zones

Early on, I made the decision to forgo a typical respawn platform and instead make both players reset to neutral after a KO. Because of this, players can now afford the risk of going deep offstage, past the point of no return. If they hit everything they were trying to, they take can their opponent’s stock and return to safety without worrying about their own recovery. It’s something you see on the last stock of the match in other games, and I wanted to make it a core mechanic here.

Air Dashes

Fluid, interesting movement is the lifeblood of platform fighters, so universal movement options were among first mechanics I designed for Boost Breakers. Once per airtime, players can dash in one of 8 directions. This airdash that can be canceled into attacks, or angled towards the ground to execute a wavedash. Airdashes and wavedashes allow for creative maneuvering, and give any character a more powerful recovery and combo game.

A-reversals

When you use an aerial and immediately press the control stick in the opposite direction, you will turn around and carry a significant amount of momentum. This is known as an a-reversal, coined after a similar technique introduced in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. A-reversals can be used in neutral to mix up your movement and convert retreating movement into offensive pressure, or to to extend combos and control your stage positioning.

Momentum

Boostbreakers does not have a movement speed cap, and almost all of the universal movement options (running, wavedashing, airdashing, etc.) will add to a character’s velocity, instead of simply replacing it. Because of this, players can move across the stage at incredibly high speeds, but only if they build up to it.