NATHAN CHANDLER GIBSON
TECHNICAL GAME DESIGNER
Sokoban Puzzler / Pet Sim | PC, Switch | 2024 | UE5
A vibrant puzzle title where solving fantastical portals rewards you with critters to aid your café business endeavours.
Contributions
Puzzle 3Cs / Game Loop Consultant
Temporarily brought on to aid a game jam team in expanding their creature collector puzzler, I mentored and supported the concept lead with 3Cs and docs on how to flesh out concepts during exploration sections.
This included workshops to explore ability kits and creating variety matrix documentation; compiling game loop guides for building an intrinsic reward experience between resource management, building empathy for creatures, and additional game juice on puzzle actions.
Narrative Scenario and Tools
After gameplay-focused external user tests, I returned to the project to support the team with a narrative scenario and dialogue tools. This included market research and scenario proposal docs, alongside UX wireframes and GDDs to cost up requirements on a smaller project.
Collaborating with a coder, we built a lightweight 2D dialogue system to coincide with the mission system to provide the player with guidance and motivations between puzzles.
Before returning back to another project, I provided the team with a 3-act playable draft of a portal-hunting young-mystery narrative and lore deck; placing mission event triggers in maps that fire based on conditional checks built using UE5's tag system to call assigned cutscene data assets.
