DAN

SOCIAL MEDIA:

OVERVIEW

Dan Brewer is a game designer with 16 years of experience.
He's worked across AAA and indie studios. From augmented reality party games, to horror interactive dramas to extraction shooters based in spaaace. He's seen things!

He grew up on a cattle farm in Somerset and had to battle his brothers for electricity to use the Commodore 64. A family man and a great despiser of gardening. He's settled in Guildford, Surrey (United Kingdom) and loves nothing more than a good pub quiz with friends.

(He's greatly disturbed by writing in the third person, so will be strictly 1st person from now onwards ;) )

CAREER DETAILS

Bossa Games

I headed up the multi-disciplinary leadership group for a second development team within Bossa. We focused on work-for-hire projects, consisting of a Lead Artist, Lead Engineer, Senior Producer and little 'ole me!

I led the design and creative direction for our team. This included multiple project pitches for new IP projects and responses to RFPs. I generated 100+ concepts within the space of a couple of months, to be filtered down and developed into full pitch decks. This involved maintaining alignment both within the team, but also maintaining alignment with Bossa's creative management team.

I spent roughly a year at Bossa working as a level designer co-dev resource for Camouflaj on the VR title, "Batman: Arkham Shadow". Winning multiple VR game of the year awards, I enjoyed working within Unity to a high production level and the high level of detail and polish to reach the 'Arkham' quality bar.
Work included level concepting and early design. Level blockouts and early prototyping. Encounter balancing, detective mode crime scene design, and Ai scripting. Puzzle and narrative design. Production-grade implementation of both core path content and side-mission content. General bugfixing, QA and polish.
It's a great VR workout too if you like dispensing justice via your very own fists!

I had the pleasure of managing 2 designers at Bossa. Providing 1:1s with regular feedback and evaluations. I was pleased to be involved in developing a junior designer to the point of promotion.

DPS was working on an Unreal Engine 5-based Free-to-Play tactical vehicle multiplayer shooter game called "When Tomorrow Falls" (WTF!). Which I worked on for the majority of my time at DPS.

I was hired to lead the Hero design team at DPS games, but eventually this grew into a larger responsibility, owning the core gameplay and heroes across the core gameplay and metagame.
Later on in the project I was entrusted with covering an extended period of leave for the Design Director. This required me to represent the design department in director meetings and to repair broken relationships with key members of the leadership team.

The Hero team started with just the internal team of about 4 Hero designers and 1 vehicle handling specialist, but then grew to eventually be ~8 internal hero designers and ~15 external designers. The externals were split across different development partners, across multiple timezones, and involved me producing briefs, documentation, metrics, reviews and communication to keep us all aligned. - We didn't want the Aussies creating upside-down vehicles, did we!

Internally, I enjoyed keeping the Hero team developing. I ran regular 1:1s and skills development sessions to help keep the different team members moving forwards in their careers. I worked with a junior designer to reach a promotion and worked closely with a senior designer to improve their process on "improving core systems and working with engineers".

Whilst this was mostly a management role, the situation often required me to get stuck in with design work. The largest piece of work was definiding the structure for what makes up a Hero character and how they tied together with the meta game. But I was also able to apply my experience with 3Cs design work (Camera, Character and Controls), simplifying the player vehicles armour system, gunplay experience and directing improvements for vehicle handling.

DPS Games

I was hired onto the 'console' team at Creative Assembly, who were just starting work on "Halo Wars 2". - A HALO GAME?! Woohoo!

Shortly after being hired, the design director and lead core designer left, so I stepped up and led the core design team. This involved things like hiring, design processes, director communication and taking accountability for the delivery of core gameplay features and content - All this whilst being tasked up with my own workload. I loved it!

My work involved updating the in-game economy of Halo Wars 2, adding a secondary resource to help increase the depth and balancing levers for new units we were going to add. Bringing HW2 in line with contemporary RTS competitors. Involved lots of balancing and lively debates with the core design team. I also helped champion analytics for HW2, building a strong base for live service telemetry and live product balancing once the game released. Working with data analysts and gameplay engineers to implement and test data and reports.
I worked on 3Cs features too, taking ownership of the camera and the controls. Whilst Halo Wars 1 gave us a fantastic base to work on, we tweaked the camera settings and controls to allow for new features like control groups on controller and PC.

After Halo Wars 2, we moved onto the title soon to become "Hyenas". An extraction heist multiplayer FPS set in spaaaaaace. This project was catnip for me!
During the early concepting of the project, I was a big part of the design team, prototyping the game in Unreal. We had a fast iterative process which allowed us to quickly bash stuff together and then test it daily in multiplayer. We iterated quickly on game modes, core mechanics, Ai, weapons and gadgets.

I actioned, concepted, prototyped and developed the unique zero-gravity movement system for Hyenas. This became a USP for the game and allowed us to create memorable levels, enemies and unique combat.
I also concepted and prototyped key gadgets and hero abilities early in the project, cementing their inclusion in the final game. Leading to develop the hero characters and features around hero structure and hero-shooter ethos.

My time in Hyenas also gave me more oppertunities to develop my management skills. Mentoring core designers working on core gameplay systems like 'weapons', 'Ai enemies' and helping them develop strong processes and relationships with their co-workers to form effective feature teams.

Throughout my time at Creative Assembly I also worked with CA's outreach program, talking at school and universities, and giving careers advice at game shows and expos. 'Gotta love a bit of giving back!

Awdawdadw

Creative Assembly

Supermassive Games

Supermassive Games was my first job in the games industry. As a Game designer I worked on multiple games for Supermassive, but because it was so long ago I can't recall the exact specifics of each project! Here's an overview:

• Until Dawn

  • Locomotion and Camera design and developing tools and features for level content to enhance the ease of movement between camera cuts and up and down staircases.

  • Implementation of key animation-driven interactions

  • Level scripting and interaction setup

• Spy Ops

  • Mobile game core concept design including meta progression loops

  • Unit design, upgrades and balancing

  • Base building system design

• Wonderbook: Walking with Dinosaurs

  • Activity design

  • Level design

  • Augmented reality mechanics design

  • User testing

• Multiple Interactive drama prototypes

  • Aided studio in landing Until Dawn project

  • Designing, prototyping and implementing interactive drama sequences

  • Directing motion capture sessions at Pinewood’s mocap studio

  • Deep dive analysis of existing interactive drama titles

• Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock

  • Aid with initial pitch material.

  • Level design and implementation.

  • Core mechanics design and prototyping (Movement, interactions, co-op actions)

• Killzone HD remaster

  • Achievements design.

  • Balancing and tuning

• Little Big Planet 3 pitch work

  • Pitch deck content work.

• Start the Party

  • Augmented reality minigame concepting and design.

  • Design data and tuning for minigames.