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Shae Souter Willett

Game Designer

Professional Experience

The Last of Us Part 1

(2023)

The Last of Us Part 1 is a remake of the critically acclaimed 2013 game The Las of Us, it features enhanced combat and exploration, expanded accessibility options, and a cutsomizable roguelike mode.

  • Took ownership of the custom mode of the roguelike game mode, No Return.
  • Created spreadsheets to track issues from various combinations of game mode customization.
  • Found ad hoc bugs and issues from all parts of the game

The Last of Us Online

(2022 - 2023)

The Last of Us Online is a cancelled multiplayer game in the The Last of Us universe originally developed as a muliplayer mode for TLOU Part 2, and later as its own standalone game.

  • Worked with game director to test and tweak levels to further align with core design principles
  • Was point of contact for traversal related bugs and issues.
  • Took on bugs with especially low reproducibility from various departments in the studio

Projects

Raincoat

(2025 - 2026)

Raincoat is an atmospheric first person shooter about tracking down objectives in a city afflicted with perpetual rain. Explore tunnels, mountains, and skylines to power up a long dormant space elevator and escape the planet. I chose to use Unreal Engine 5 for this project to create a moody atmoshpere using light reflection and rain. This combined with punchy FPS combat creates a push and pull of intensity between combat, and exploration.

  • Designed and implemented core game loop from concept to production
  • Quickly created and iterated various gameplay mechanics to fine tune fun momement to moment gameplay.
  • Created mood boards and researched city architecture to create the aesthetic and layout of the world

Gatcha Pop

(2025)

Gatchapop is a first person arcade shooter where the player must shoot bubbles at gatchapon toys and push them into scoring zones to get a highscore. This game was created in three days with a small team for Global Game Jam 2025.

  • Worked with a small team to create concept fitting the game jam's theme "Bubble."
  • Designed bubble gun interactions that created player expression through movement tech, and skill shots.
  • Polsihed gameplay and fixed bugs after the completion of the game jam.

Soul Racer

(2024 - 2025)

Soul Racer is a fast paced third person platformer that encorporates racing mechanics to create smooth and snappy player movement. This was my first project after leaving Naughty Dog, and I wanted to use what I had learned as the point of contact for player traversal into creating a great feeling character controller.

  • Designed and implemented complex character controller that shfits between racing and platforming states.
  • Built progessively difficult platforming challenges to teach the player core movement tecniques.
  • Rapidly iterated on multiple systems to incentivise fun player gameplay.

About Me

Shae Souter Willett

(1996 - Now)

I'm a game designer focusing on efficient game systems, crunchy combat puzzles, and expressive player traversal. I started in the quality assurance department at Naughty Dog, and was quickly trusted with design tasks on their now cancelled game, The Last of Us Online.

Since then, I have been a resident at a local indie game art collective called Glitch City LA. There I've been working on solo and team projects while honing my skills as a developer in Unity, Unreal, and Javascript.