About the Tomb Keeper

I’m Daniel Jacobs, a game designer with over two decades of experience building PC and console games, MMOs, and strange side projects that probably shouldn’t work, but somehow do.

Currently, I’m a Game Designer at Amazon Games working on New World, where I design zones, dungeons, and systems for a live sandbox MMO. Before that, I led and contributed to design on multiple shipped titles across studios like Double Helix Games, The Collective, Taldren, Dragonstone Software, and Interplay.

My specialties live at the intersection of worldbuilding, systems design, and moment-to-moment gameplay — taking a blank page and turning it into a place where players want to stay “just one more run.”

When I’m not wrangling MMOs, I’m prototyping new ideas in Roblox and Unreal Engine: spooky arcade experiences, competitive spy shooters, golf balls rolling through ruined worlds, and other experiments that may or may not be sentient.

Tomb Map: Featured Relics & Projects

Modern Relic: New World (Amazon Games)

• Zone Design – Designed multiple open-world zones, including terrain layout, biome distribution, encounter placement, and traversal flow to support questing and endgame loops.
• Expeditions / Dungeons – Designed the Garden of Genesis and Dynasty Shipyard expeditions, focusing on encounter pacing, boss mechanics, and co-op readability.
• World Systems & Prefabs – Established a reusable prefab hierarchy for player-built structures, world flora, and interactive props, enabling fast iteration and consistent behavior across the world team.
• Core Systems Documentation – Authored foundational design docs for vitals, HUD, inventory, crafting, fishing, and housing, aligning UX, code, and content around shared systems goals.
• Starter Experiences – Designed the Starter Beach and its early quest flow, onboarding new players into combat, gathering, and exploration.
• Seasonal & Live Updates – Supported ongoing seasonal content and new features, integrating fresh mechanics into existing world spaces.

Ancient Relics: Shipped Console & PC Titles

(Lead / Senior / Systems & Level Design roles across studios.)

• Silent Hill: Homecoming – Narrative-driven horror design, encounter pacing, and environmental storytelling.
• Strider – Fast-paced action platforming, combat arenas, and traversal-focused level layouts.
• Front Mission Evolved – Mission structure, enemy encounters, and mech combat spaces.
• Battleship: The Video Game – Campaign flow, encounter scripting, and mission beats.
• G.I. Joe – Third-person combat encounters and linear mission design.
• The Da Vinci Code – Puzzle design and environment layouts supporting narrative progression.
• Star Wars Episode III (game tie-in) – Combat spaces, pacing, and cinematic integration.

Side Quests: Personal & Prototype Worlds

I like testing ideas in smaller sandboxes where I can move quickly and break things without waking the live-ops dragon.

• Solomon’s Castle – A psychological horror experience framed as a cursed arcade. Focus on atmosphere, subtle systems, and player paranoia.
• Dreamcade Fever – A Roblox prototype where players advance through increasingly surreal escape rooms inside a single arcade cabinet.
• Spy Street – Team-based spy vs. spy in a cozy lakeside neighborhood: data heists, disguises, and simultaneous offense/defense.
• American Super Ninja – A “Vampire Survivors”-style horde platformer built on Roblox’s platformer template, focused on kinetic flow and satisfying enemy death moments.
• Plus numerous combat sandboxes, AI experiments, and traversal prototypes in Unreal Engine (Blueprint-only) and Roblox.

Relics of Power: Skills & Capabilities

Design Domains

Open-World / Zone Design Dungeon & Encounter Design Systems & Economy Design Progression / Onboarding Narrative Integration Live Game Content

Technical & Tooling

Proprietary MMO World Tools Unreal Engine (Blueprint) Roblox Studio Maya (layout/blockout) Scripting / Logic Design Prefab / Modular Pipelines

Collaboration & Leadership

Cross-Discipline Collaboration Feature Pitching & Proposals Design Documentation Mentoring Designers Working with Live-Ops Scope & Risk Management

Scrolls of Experience: Career Timeline

Design Philosophy: How I Explore the Tomb

• Player-first readability. If the player can’t read the space or the rules, nothing else matters.
• Systems with teeth. I like systems that are simple to explain, but produce surprising outcomes over time.
• Spaces that tell stories. Combat arenas, starter beaches, haunted arcades — the environment should carry its own narrative weight.
• Iterate in public. I’m comfortable shipping, learning, and refining live, especially on long-running projects and MMOs.
• Respect the team. Great design happens when engineering, art, audio, and production can all contribute to the solution.

Summoning Ritual: Contact

To summon the Tomb Keeper for game design roles, consulting, or collaboration on strange prototypes:

• Email: youremail [at] example [dot] com
• LinkedIn: Your LinkedIn Profile
• Other portals: Portfolio links, itch.io, YouTube breakdowns, etc.

Attach a short description of your project, what you need help with, and your timeline so we can jump straight into the interesting problems.

Guestbook of Lost Souls

In true GeoCities fashion, imagine there’s a tiny text box here where you can sign the guestbook and say:

• Which game you first met my work through.
• What kind of worlds you’d like to see next.
• Your favorite cursed design problem.

(Feature pending: glowing “Submit” button that never quite works.)