Summary
Melanie Dickinson is a Freelance Technical Designer with 11 years blending narrative craft, systems design, and tooling to create stories that respond meaningfully to player action. She specializes in systemic and emergent narrative—writing dialogue, building authoring tools, and implementing content so characters and storylines evolve with gameplay. Her background includes shipping a storylet-driven roguelite and designing a recombinative, fully voice-acted generative dialog system for Borderlands: Echovision, plus authoring tools that streamlined writing-to-voice pipelines. Previously she led PCG and personalization research at Zynga and architected live design tools still used in production. Trained as a PhD computational media researcher and a BS in computer science, she thrives at the intersection of research, production, and cross-discipline collaboration. She enjoys turning complex design problems into playful, accessible tools—recently prototyping a kid-friendly game creation tool as part of her freelance work.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
University of California Santa Cruz