Austen van der Byl | Game Designer
Hi! I'm Austen :>
I'm currently wrapping up my degree in Game Design at USC. I grew up in South Africa and attended an international boarding school in Downtown Los Angeles [3 years] and Hong Kong [2 years]. I grew up super multi-cultural, and insist on multi-cultural spaces as much as I can manage. I love working across disciplines and strongly value the celebration of our differences as people; we are better because of them. (Also I don't have a beard anymore.)
I've spent most of my time in games working in various design positions ranging from map and level design, combat design and balancing, narrative design, and overall experience design. I've taken game ideas from paper prototypes to finished products and am practiced in an iterative and concentric design process.
Some of my inspirations (outside of my friends and the world around me)
Ichiko Aoba
Celeste
The Stormlight Archive
Violet Evergarden
R.A.P. Ferreira
Jacob Collier
clipping
The Myth of Sisyphus
Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood
WALL-E
Bee and Puppycat
Princess Mononoke
Blue Period
The JWST
Naissancee
Gorogoa
Not sure what you're doing here, but if you're really interested, here is something for you to read about other stuff I've done and am generally interested in. I like folding really teeny tiny paper boats, and I recently made my friends a bunch of earrings with them. To pay for my first year of college living expenses, I made live edge, resin tables with my god-brother: https://www.instagram.com/calebylee_design/. When I first came to LA, I was too young and anxious to go to concerts, but during my college years, my favorite thing has been going to see all the random and different musicians I love. Back home we have two cats and a dog I miss very dearly, and little enough light pollution to see the night sky. I grew up playing a lot of squash and wish I still had reliable access to play. If you're really still in need of more things to read that I've written, go follow all the links on the Art Games Thesis page.