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.
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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.
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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.
