Austen van der Byl | Game Designer

Hi! I'm Austen :>

I grew up in South Africa and attended an international boarding school in Downtown Los Angeles [3 years], attended another international boarding school in Hong Kong [2 years], spent four years in LA as I completed my degree at USC in Interactive Media and Game Design, and now reside in Cape Town. As you might guess from the not-so-short list preceding this sentence, I grew up super multi-culturally. Professionally and inter-personally, I insist on multi-cultural spaces as much as I can manage; diverse perspective have made me who I am today. 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, and my friend who takes the best pictures of me is on the other side of the world :')

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, overall experience design, sound design, and various flavours of production. I've taken game ideas from paper prototypes to finished products and am practiced in an iterative and concentric design process. I love making games, playing games, thinking about games, laughing about games I play and make, (crying about games I play and make), and hope that in making games, I can help make the world a better place.