GAME DESIGNER AT COOLGAMES
In January of 2016 I started my graduation internship as a game designer at the CoolGames game studio in Amsterdam. For 8 months I worked as a game –and level designer on different casual, social and puzzle games. My responsibilities included level design for Tetris Twist, Jewel Academy, Farm Fever and the Pacman runner game. Game design wise I did all of the design for a Miffy match-3 game as well as worked on a number of different puzzle and digital board games including Bubble Charms, Flow and Checkers. The design challenges were diverse, for example designing a score system for a puzzle game or revamping the levels for the Pacman Runner because they were found to be too difficult. During the internship I have improved on my design documentation, making it better arranged depending on the stage of production, learned to create better flow-charts and successfully tackled different design challenges.
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After graduating I was offered a full-time contract to start as a Game Designer at CoolGames where I continued working on the above mentioned games. One of my first assignments was to create a new mechanic for Jewel Academy. I designed what we called a "shaping tile". A tile that needs to be matched with each color before it can be collected. I created the documentation and wire-frames and worked closely with the artists and programmers to implement this new mechanic.
When business shifted to focus on the Facebook Instant platform (late 2016) I got to work on a new project: Angry Birds. Rovio wanted to bring their iconic game to this new platform and do something different with it, which included making use of Facebook's social features. This turned into a 1 versus 1 Angry Birds game. I designed the core game, the power-up system, monetization flow, several meta-game features (not everything has made it into the game yet) and some of the levels.