Game Designer

• Defining overall game mechanics
• Designing levels that utilize available mechanics
• Being the middleman to align art and programming with the game direction

I was the sole designer in a team of programmers and a freelance artist. This was a unique challenge as the entire design pipeline had to be handled by myself.

I began by defining what I wanted in the game. I pitched the idea to the programmers and rescoped it to meet our manpower budgets and to work with each programmers’ strengths and interests.

As it was running on a custom engine, I had to work with the programmers to specify the tools that can help make my job easier. By the end of production, we were able to quickly create and edit full levels by either running in Editor Mode or through manipulating a json file for quick edits.

I also assisted in specifying the needs for a text parser that can convert the screenplay into a format that can be played the same way subtitles do.

Other than defining the mechanics, my main roles as a designer were to tweak the mechanics to suit the game, design the levels with a good pacing and challenge, and handle all the UI/UX topics.

As we didn’t have a full time artist working with us, we were quite limited on what we can do art-wise. Considering that, I had the artist help us with things that were more artistically technical like creating the skyboxes. Otherwise, I took on the art duties such as modeling, texturing, and lighting.

Being the middleman between art and programming, my job also entailed communicating consistently with the team on the state of things and assisting with rescoping in case anything falls behind.