Hepler spent a large portion of her time in high school writing and selling short stories. During her college years, she met Chris Hepler and developed an interest in doing professional writing for role-playing games after being introduced to
Vampire: The Masquerade and
Shadowrun. Together they co-wrote sourcebooks for
Shadowrun,
Earthdawn and
Paranoia, and later worked as scriptwriters in
Hollywood for six years. A notable project Hepler contributed to was
CBS Television’s
The Agency. Hepler eventually met BioWare representatives at the
Game Developers Conference one year, and commenced employment at BioWare from 2005 onwards. Hepler worked with the first three mainline titles in the
Dragon Age franchise, starting with 2009's
Dragon Age: Origins. Hepler was responsible for developing dwarven civilization and culture in the
Dragon Age setting, Thedas, and wrote the origin stories of
dwarven player characters as well as the narrative for the Deep Roads region. Hepler said she wanted the setting's dwarven culture to reflect the dichotomies between extreme wealth and power, to extreme poverty and disenfranchisement.
Origins was a
critical and commercial success, with particular praise for its story and characters. In subsequent sequels to
Origins, Hepler's writing contributions for notable
Dragon Age characters include
Anders and
Cassandra Pentaghast. Hepler was also involved with writing work for multiple questlines in the
massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG)
Star Wars: The Old Republic. Following Hepler's departure from BioWare, she became the lead writer of
Game of Thrones Ascent. Hepler was at one point attached to write for
Ambrov X, an episodic RPG set in the
Sime~Gen Universe, provided a funding stretch goal on
Kickstarter was met. She was one of the contributors for the 2015 book
The Game Narrative Toolbox, which discuss the role of a narrative designer on a video game development team. She later joined Kognito, a health simulation company which develops apps that utilizes interactive conversations for the purposes of educating, motivating and helping clients. In 2016, she is credited as the editor for
Women in Game Development: Breaking the Glass Level-Cap, a book which discuss the experiences of
female videogame developers about their work as well as the harassment and hostility they sometimes receive from end users of the products they contributed to. Hepler is credited as story co-designer for 2018 video game
Unavowed. As of December 2020, Hepler works at
Pixelberry Studios as a senior writer. ==Writing style==