Me, the designer

Short summary

Game design is approached differently by every designer in my opinion. To me, game design is a source of inspiration and entertainment. It is a real pleasure to create something and I enjoy seeing others having fun with something I made.

Designing games raises ethical questions too, and the psychology of manipulation was something I have always kept in mind, ensuring that my creations cause no harm to their users. This creationist mindset helped me to treat my work as a source of fun, but also as a responsibility.

During my high school studies I had focused on coding and while game development is not my major focus, it proved to be quite interesting and a very useful skill. It helps me creating quick representations when explaining my ideas to developers and artists during project work.

Creativity is a skill I highly value, and I feel this is also my strongest talent. To come up with something new is not only a challenge I enjoy, but also a great opportunity to make something innovative and progressive. Creating something new, or combining already existing elements is something I have started to do from an early age. I like what I do and I am always motivated and hard-working, doing my best.

I appreciate good team work. I am open-minded, flexible and have strong competences which I bring to the table when in a team. I also have good coordination and organization skills, which comes handy when I am in charge of a development team.

So far, I have worked mostly in smaller groups (from 3 to 10 people), and my main role was designer and quite often the group leader as well. I am very pleased that all of these groups performed and functioned sufficiently. The road to the end of a project is almost never smooth and I highly value all the experiences.

Creative design

Creative design is a very generic term, covering a wide area. Coming up with a new project idea, innovation on any design aspect or just finding new ways to differentiate a game from the others all fall under this category. Nonetheless, this is my personal favorite area.

Creativity is a skill I appreciate the most, and I really enjoy employing my own. Coming up with new mechanics or concepts, or just iterating on an existing one is always fun and a great challenge that highly motivates me. This challenge and the benefits of a positive outcome were strong driving factors for me when choosing game designer as a job.

I find creative design to be especially important when working on serious games. Although using games and gamification seems to be a trend nowadays, in many cases it misses its target and fails to reach its goal due to the lack of a good concept or the right approach.

Story telling

I fell in love with reading during my years in primary and secondary schools. I easily chew through thousands of pages in a year and started soon creating my own stories, mostly when playing with my sister. All these came very handy during my university projects, giving me the capability to come up with decent stories. 

Creating quests and scenarios or just an overarching story for other elements related to games were also present in my life. On the one hand, I loved collecting and playing with LEGO. These plays always built around an epic story that unfolded in days or even weeks. On the other hand, many computer games, such as Heroes of Might and Magic, for example, had a map creator tool. I was able to create custom scenarios for myself reflecting to my own stories. This was a good practice for game design in general as it included balancing and level design in addition to the story telling.

Level design

The aforementioned map creation is a perfect example for level design, but the situation is the same with almost all of my study projects. While not all of these projects included complex level systems, it was always interesting to design the levels.

In overall, maps and game area layouts were always super intriguing for me. When playing, I like to find everything on a given area. Therefore, I spend a lot of time exploring and learning how the level is built up. While doing so, I always start to think how I would build up the same level and, more importantly, how I would build upon it. For example, in an RPG (Role Playing Game) where would I put the enemies, items and merchants, or where would I bait the player into a trap and how would it weave the story.

Prototyping

As a designer, I have found it crucial both in my work and study projects to express and present my concept in the best possible way. Moreover, for testing ideas it is good to have a prototype as early as possible. This is even more true when working on a tabletop game.

I have recycled many board game elements from early age to create my own games and this capability and intention of reusing whatever is available still remained when I developed skills to create more advanced prototypes both digitally and physically. 

Nowadays, following the very first “paper” prototype, I use Unity to create the simplest greybox levels to present my concepts. For this purpose, I had to learn C# on a basic level.

Playtesting and balancing

Playtesting and balancing games were a regular part of all my design projects. To achieve a good and enjoyable outcome, testing proved to be important for both computer and tabletop games.

The photos displayed on the front page were all taken at such events I have attended. These events and my projects helped me to learn how to communicate with players in order to gather meaningful feedback. They also helped in trying various testing methods and learning which method is the most effective for the types of games and for the purpose of the trials.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, now I also have some online testing experience. This not only posed new challenges, but surely will be a valuable experience in the long run.

User Interface (UI) & User Experience (UX) design

I consider the UX a key aspect both when playing and when designing a game. To begin with, initially I had rather limited experience, always playing on PC only. Therefore, developing the first games for mobile, console or VR was a really eye opener experiences, which also encouraged me more seriously researching the different platforms and the context why and how people play on them.

The same can be said about the UI of the different platforms. Also, fortunately my projects have covered a wide range of people types, developing games for kids and more elder people too. The projects taught me a good awareness on the importance of small aspects and how much they can impact the overall experience.

There are a vast number of tools available, from which I have worked with Adobe XD, Figma, Unity and InVision.

Project leading

While I am still a junior professional, I have already got some experience in leading projects. Having perhaps the most initiative among my peers, I was almost always the project leader in the case of the study projects displayed in this portfolio. Since I would like to eventually have the capabilities of a lead designer, I put extra efforts in developing my skills in this area.

For the game development project, which I had for the castle of Fehérvárcsurgó (in Hungary), I had to manage a complete work project. I am proud of the end result (the three games), and have now the basic experience of doing well when in charge of a task. I did like the challenge it came with and I hope to gain more experience in the future.

Art designer & artist

While being a designer, art is not my primal focus. Still, I have always aimed to learn as much about the other two main roles (developer and artist) as possible.

While painting in general, and specifically miniatures, is a hobby for me, finding it enjoyable and relaxing, a more work-oriented approach to the artistic side of games is art design. The use of colours, shapes, atmosphere and music all contribute to the game experience. Adjusting all these in a way to effectively enhance and support the game is also an important tool in my arsenal as a designer.

Since the start of the pandemic, I have picked up miniature painting as a hobby, which turned out to be a great and relaxing experience. On the left, you can see my first proper painted figure ever.

 

Ethical manipulation

This is a special area of my expertise. During my studies, I have realized that while being taught all the various design patterns and methods, there are little consideration on how they impact the user and even less on how ethical their usage is.

This motivated me to study ethical manipulation as a special study in addition to my regular one. With the development of new technologies and with the development of more and more sophisticated tools, the arsenal for designers to influence and change player behavior have rapidly increased in the past 20 years. Many of these improvements have benefited the payers, however there are a high number of examples on the negative impacts it created.

Personally, I believe that game designers have a great responsibility as the impact of games on society seems to be growing at a rapid speed.