Nick Heindl

Nick is a Madison-based engineer-turned-designer most recently working at ZeniMax Online Studios (ZOS) as their Principal Accessibility Technical Designer. His passion for game development stems from a love of creation, collaboration, and empowering teams to do their best work.

At ZOS, Nick was responsible for overseeing accessibility of a new AAA MMORPG and ensuring the experience can be playable and loved by all. This role brought Nick into tight collaboration with various feature teams across the studio, alongside more publishing focused teams such as User Research and Localization. Coordinating, designing, and diving into code all made up a typical day for him.

Before the creation of this new role, Nick was the project's Xbox Accessibility Champion while also working as a Senior Technical Designer. As an STD on a fairly fresh Tech Design team, Nick helped establish many best practices, processes, and procedures for the project at large. On the implementation side, Nick's efforts were focused on helping stand-up a new scripting environment, technical feature ownership of dialogue systems and pipelines, and scaling up various systems to withstand the needs of a live service game.

Prior to his employment at ZOS, Nick worked as a Gameplay Engineer at PUBG Corp and Raven Software where he contributed to various titles, including Call of Duty Warzone, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, and PUBG.

Outside of games, Nick is passionate about Language, Lego, and Learning new things. He adores spending time with his various pets: The cats, S'Krivva, Jiggle Billy, and Lily, as well as Leonard the bearded dragon.

Currently Playing: Fantasy Life i, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Unnamed Space Idle

All Time Favs: Dark Cloud, Katamari, Fallout 3/NV, Pokemon Snap, Timesplitters, Edith Finch, Harvest Moon, SOMA, Red Dead Redemption (1), and Conker's Bad Fur Day.