Game Designer
An Interdisciplinary Artist
Welcome, my name is Michael Bull. I am a game designer who loves to tell a narrative within every world that I create. I have a creative and analytical background in QA testing and Digital Marketing. In all of the teams I have been a part of, I have aimed to lead and learn.
Team Developed Games
Colossal Peaks (2023) - Mobile Game
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For this unforgiving climber, I had to adjust the design style to suit the casual mobile gameplay. This involved a lot of quality-of-life features including autosaving, player feedback, and touchscreen menu navigation.
As a designer in a small specialist team, I also had to flex my t-shaped learning and work on a lot of aspects outside of my specialism.
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- Team Lead
- Systems Design
- UX Design
- Scripting (C#)
- Level Design
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Root Directory (2023) - Game Jam
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Root Directory is a game made within 48 hours by a team of 8 people. My role within the team consisted of organisation, level design, and narrative design. The challenge of creating an engaging narrative within a short experience was a fun challenge. I also found working alongside other specialists helped me influence my other pieces of work, learning the skills and needs they require.
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- Level Design
- Scrum Master
- Puzzle Design
- Narrative Design
SnowDown (2022) - Split Screen Shooter
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As the first group university game, I had to quickly master working in an agile manner and develop my leadership skills. This was all in all successful with an engaging and competitive split-screen shooter having been produced from it.
Many of the team members asked to be on my team for Colossal Peaks my second year team game. I count this as a success for my leadership skills and my general work practice.​
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- Scrum Master
- Main Menu Design
- Unity Development
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Solo Projects
Reflection - Mini Puzzle Game
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This puzzle is a prototype of a larger puzzle game. For this game, I wanted to create puzzles that are not as linear and standard as others in the space. This involved using perspectives, riddles, and restrictions to push the player in the right direction.
This development was really interesting and insightful as there were a lot of routes I could have gone with this and I would like to work on this further.
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- Puzzle Design
- Writing
- Unity Development
- Prototyping
Getting Up - A Wellness Game
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"Getting Up" was an important game to me as it was the first solo project I worked on and I wanted to make a games for impact game. There were a lot of challenges I faced whilst making this game. Including learning in-depth Unity skills and working with Fungus the narrative tool. But I think as a game with an intention and an atmosphere it was a success.
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- System Design
- Research
- C# Programming
- Fungus
Rapid Prototypes
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A very important skill of a game designer is being able to produce prototypes to test out an idea. Within this project, I aim to create an idea, explore the pillars of why I think this idea would work, and create a micro prototype in a game engine that I think would work well with it.
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- Rapid Prototyping
- Design Documents
-Idea Brainstorming