Austen van der Byl | Game Design Portfolio
Game Designer | USC Interactive Media and Games Division
Click on any project for additional information, links, and my role in their creation.
Email: austenvdb@gmail.com | LinkedIn | Art Games Thesis | Blue Monarch Games
Featured Projects
An FPS resource management roguelike set in a world of plants and steampunk. I started working with one of my best friends in freshman year of college on this game concept. We eventually made it during our junior year through USC Game's AGP program where I worked as the Design Lead for the lifetime of the game.
Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2456330/Bloompunk/
Top-down action adventure game - play as Postman Mouse, friend of Eldritch and Ordinary alike. I co-founded Blue Monarch Games and worked as Design Lead for this project. As a team of six, we worked full time for eight weeks to go from a paper prototype to finished game.
Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2164970/Keep_Me_Posted/
For my final year of college, two of my best friends and I decided to take the minimum amount of classes possible and create space an undergraduate thesis of our own design. In the last half of 2023, we made 9 game prototypes, each attempting to address a specific question or prompt through the medium of games. You can read about each of these on our blog: https://artgamesthesis.com/. In our final semester, we are in production to create an art game about hyperreality.
This trailer represents the gameplay prototype I produced for my internship at Millennium-LA. It is a 3D mobile, exploration, puzzle game where you explore Jianou city as your own avatar, meeting friendly faces along the way and helping out where you can.
Other projects I've worked on
Omi has something to tell you... Will you listen? Experimental narrative game with contextual storytelling.
Gather ingredients to bake magical desserts to explore the world with magical abilities! Third person exploration/cozy game.
A 2D PC base-building game where players construct and defend a town on the back of a moving turtle.
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.