Hey, I’m rory Knox

I hate talking about myself. There’s so many more interesting things in this world but I figured that if there’s anywhere that I should talk about myself it’s on roryknox.com.

The purpose of this website is to talk about all the things I do professionally, from Game QA to my independent Game Design projects. But the About Me section should give you a glimpse at who the rest of me is.

I’m married, father of three. My wife and kids are my favorite people on this earth. I’m not great at it, but I love being a family man.

I Like stories of all kinds, but I really love sci-fi and fantasy and the places where they meet. Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Mass Effect, Marvel, Batman, ATLA whatever the flavor of the month is. But I really love the stories that either have some form of the Hero’s Journey or a mentorship aspect of it (if there’s space wizards or dragons, that’s always an added bonus).

I bounce between hobbies, but I currently am a fan of RPGs (mostly D&D, but I’m exploring Pathfinder and Daggerheart). I’ve DM’d a few times and I’m trying to get a game together to surprise my kids. I like building computers, taking apart electronics and wondering why I have extra screws. I have put multiple distros of Linux on my computers and I like tinkering with Raspberry Pi things.

I have a huge passion for Lego. I had a gigantic collection at my parents house growing up and now that’s used by “the cousins” (my kids and their cousins) when everybody is around. I started my own collection as an adult that is starting the rival what I had as a kid. I also like designing sets on my computer. I may put some of them here eventually.

I also LOVE hiking and I hope one day to do the North Bend Triple Crown where I hike 3 peaks in one day, Mount Si, Mailbox Peak, and Mount Teneriffe. Currently I can do maybe one of those and go home to cry.

On to the boring part:

I’ve been designing levels off-and-on for games that I like since 2006. I started out messing around with levels for Battlefield 2. At the time I was intimidated by making that large of a level and I switched to working on Counter-Strike: Source since my friends and I regularly played that at LAN parties (anybody else miss LAN parties?) CS:S was great because of the size of the levels which taught me a lot about how levels are arranged and things I needed to think about when designing levels. I quickly began learning about things like sight-lines and paying attention to the time it takes to get to objectives, balancing maps for two teams. I did a mix of real world locations brought into the Hammer editor and making up my own locations. I really liked the real locations, especially the places my friends were familiar with. At the LAN parties I would have questionnaires for my friends to fill out and I would adjust things based on their feedback.

Back then I was going to Digipen Institute of Technology, but very early into my first year I got a pretty bad concussion and I got behind academically . I eventually had to drop out. I did the whole “keep on keeping on” thing all the while returning to making levels for Counter-Strike or toying around with Left 4 Dead (since it shared an engine). I was working jobs that sucked the soul out of me.

CS:GO came out and I went crazy with that, updating old maps to the new version, making more maps and the bug got me again. I started looking for opportunities to be creative with games and eventually I realized that I needed to get into the game industry. I took a course on Coursera to familiarize myself with Unity and I got a job working for Parker Staffing, they had multiple positions working in Nintendo’s Redmond office. I used my experience with working at Best Buy to get onto their customer support team and then eventually got into their Product Testing department. I had always intended for QA/Testing to be a Foot-in-the-Door kind of thing, but I realized that I really like QA.

Eventually I found Hardsuit Labs and got to work QA on Fortnite for several years. I really love the work I was able to do on that game (even if it’s not my favorite game) and I loved the people I got to work with. One of my favorite things to do there when I wasn’t pestering the level designers, was looking into reproducing live bugs that had been in the game for a while. Seeing community feedback about bugs finally getting fixed fueled me while I was there.

There, a lego, are you happy? I desinged this replica of the Reliant from Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn

Games I like

Plus some screen shots of things I made in CS:GO

I have a backlog of games on Steam I should be playing through, but I keep revisiting the following instead (as they are often my favorites):

  • Stationeers ←most played game on Steam

    • I could talk for hours about it if you let me

  • Mass Effect

    • 1-3 & Andromeda, I prefer the story of 2 and the gameplay of Andromeda the most

  • Arc Raiders

    • I like shooting robots and looting stuff

  • Horizon: Zero Dawn/Forbidden West

    • I like shooting robots and looting stuff

  • Cyberpunk 2077

    • I like shooting ro…no wait, that one I like scaling the sky scrapers and taking screen shots of places I shouldn’t be able to get to

  • Baldur’s Gate 3

    • I realized I like this one like I like Mass Effect. While I play a lot of shooters, whenever I play a single player one I usually am there for the story and characters more than the shooting. BG3 let me have the story without having to worry about being bad at shooters

      Cities: Skylines

      • my go to “I’m bored” game that I get sucked into and design a whole city when I am supposed to be in bed

  • Titanfall 2

    • One of my favorite levels of all time is in this game: Effect and Cause. IYKYK

  • I have a soft spot for classic shooters like Unreal Tournament and then CS:S (I missed CS1.6, so it’s now as high on my list as CS:S)

  • and my non-Steam game: various games in the Zelda franchise (OOT, MM are my favorite)