George Avdoulos
Game Designer
Hey there! My name is George and I am a Game Designer with a MSc degree in Game Design as well as a BA in Comic Book Design and Animation.
My professional focus, is in games with a strong atmospheric character and holistic game-feel.
My most recent role was that of a Creative Director on a "yet to be announced" project co-produced by ThroughLine Games after the release the studio's award winning debut title "Forgotton Anne" which i also worked as a Game and Level Designer.
Below you can find my portfolio's highlighted game development work.
Experience
Forgotton Anne
"Forgotton Anne is a cinematic adventure game with light puzzle & platforming elements focusing on blending narrative and gameplay in a seamless immersive experience. You play as Anne, the enforcer who keeps order in the Forgotten Lands, as she sets out to quash a rebellion that might prevent her master, Bonku, and herself from returning to the human world...."
Genre: 2D Platform-Adventure
Engine: Unity 3D
Team Size: ~12
Developer : ThroughLine Games
Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: 2018
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One , Nintendo Switch, IOs, Android
Awards & Recognition:
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(Game of the year - Best Debut - Best Visuals) Spilprisen 2019
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(Best PC Game - Best Illustration for Games - Best Character Design) Indigo Design Awards, 2018
Role(s) and responsibilities: Game Designer Over 2 Years
For examples, breakdowns and elaborations of my work on this project, please refer to its project page.
Game Design
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Redesigned and simplified the game’s main mechanic ( Arca ) to holistically match the game's production scope with the story
Level Design
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Designed and adapted the game’s pre-production environments to Narrative and Gameplay Levels
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Designed, Greyboxed, and Implemented most of the environmental Interactions and Set-Piece puzzles.
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Designed, and Implemented the Flow logic in each Unity Scene( Interactions, NPC level logic, Cutscene and Dialogue setup, Seamless Scene transitions, Camera Framing etc )
Narrative Design
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Converted several points of the cinematic and narrative subtext to gameplay instead of dialogue exposition.
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Worked closely with writers to iterate story and gameplay
"Innerva" Project
"The Project currently codenamed “Innerva” is a romantic comedy adventure, blending platforming and puzzle elements into a seamless immersive experience set in a high-fantasy world in the style of the 70s & 80s animated features, and is a rework of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a sprinkle of Blackadder, Monkey Island, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and bit of Monty Python, all thrown into a highly ambitious mix."
Genre: 2D Platform-Adventure
Engine: Unity 3D
Team Size: ~4
Developer : ThroughLine Games & George Avdoulos
Release date: - Temporarily Postponed -
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch
Awards & Recognition:
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Recipient of Creative Europe’s : Support for Development of European Video Games Fund (2019)
Role(s) and responsibilities: Creative Director - Over 2 Years -
For examples, breakdowns and elaborations of my work on this project, please refer to its project page.
Direction
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Worked closely with a junior artist and an assistant writer to set both the tone and language of the game
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Worked closely with the core engineer to set the architecture of the project and its pipelines, to fit the strengths and weaknesses of our team and scope
Game Design
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Designed, documented and Iterated on gameplay mechanics over 2 major Vertical Slice revisions
Level Design
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Designed various vertical slice holistic levels
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Greyboxed the entirety of the game's narrative structure in its bare-bones.
Narrative Design
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Creator of the story, characters and interactive subtext.
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Early adaptation of the story into level and puzzle interactions
Technical Implementation
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Prototyped most game-play system code: Dynamic Items Inventory, Banter dialogue system, AI game-play states, Cinematics to Gameplay integration, etc )
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Extended an array of existing proprietary tools and code to fit the specific game project
Prince of The Yolkfolk :
The Unofficial Remaster
"When the King of Magicland rode off to the crusades, your evil Doppelgänger and Rockwart the Troll King, have taken over the kingdom, imprisoning you and casting a spell on your beloved Daisy, who came to your rescue, leaving her asleep for 100 years. It is up to you.. Dizzy, the grandson of the old epic hero.. Grandpa Dizzy.. to put things right! Escape your prison, save the kingdom from the menacing baddies, and find a way to wake your beloved."
Genre: 2D Platform-Adventure
Engine: Unity 3D
Team Size: 1
Developer: George Avdoulos
Release date: 2019
Platforms: PC
Awards & Recognition: Unannounced
Role(s) and responsibilities: Sole Developer
For examples, breakdowns and elaborations of my work on this project, please refer to its project page
Game Design
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Redesign of general Game-Feel : Responsive controls, matching kinesthetics & Camera Flow.
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Extended Inventory functions for game-play impact
Technical Design
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Complete from the grounds up development and coding of Gameplay Systems
Narrative Design
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Additional dialogue, re-contextualized Items and Characters, Extended ending.
Tales From The Void
"Travel back to a time of adventure, heroism and mystery as Edwin Albert Taylor Bragg, the British captain of the HMS E18 - on a secret mission to obliterate the Germans and win the war for the allies. When a secret weapon misfires, you and your crew are warped into space. Struggling for survival, you venture out into the asteroid field to scavenge resources and fight off hostile aliens. Food is scarce, air supply is low and time is running out. Can you escape the void and find a way home?"
Genre: Squad-based, Real Time Tactics Survival (3D)
Engine: Unity 3D
Team Size: ~6
Developer: Portaplay
Publisher: BlackDog
Release date: 2016
Platforms: Steam, Apple Store
Role(s) and responsibilities: Level Designer - 3D Artist - 3 Months
For examples, breakdowns and elaborations of my work on this project, please refer to its project page.
Level Design
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Designed & greyboxed the Tutorial mission level
Designed & greyboxed 2 mission levels -
Designed & finalized modular level mechanics to be used throughout
3D Art
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Sculpted and finalized gameplay ready geometry in Zbrush
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Worked closely with technical and level designers to shift the team's design pipeline to 3d sculpting
2D Art
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Additional 2d UI elements
Skills
Game Design
Gameplay Design
Gameplay Scripting
Level Design
Puzzle Design
Narrative Design
Art
Visual Development
Concept Art
Art Direction
Production
Project Architecture
Pipeline Development
Languages
Fluent in English and Greek
Software and Tools
Game Development
Unity 3D
C #
Visual Studio
Photoshop
Production
Google Sheets / Excel
Miro
Jira / Pivotal
Version Control
Git - SourceTree
SVN
Plastic
Communication
Slack
Discord
Skype
About Me
Ever since I was a child, I would split my time in the outdoors of rural Sparta and getting lost in the fantastical worlds of Films, and Video Games, nurturing a precious to me abstract way of thinking, that is still my main prism of analyzing this ever-evolving vast world.
It was because of games and films that i would constantly draw, create or recreate worlds, all the way to the Art and Animation School. But terms like Game Designer, and Concept Artist were still barely new in Greece of the early 2000s. Since there was no real industry for that, the closest path to professionally create an something akin to “Another World”, “Prince of Persia” and “Monkey Island” that i grew up with, was through applying to study writing and designing Comic Books. And so between my art studies and the earliest bootlegged versions of Game Maker, my path was set.
Around the time I was finally pursuing a Master’s program in Game Design from the IT University of Copenhagen, the field of Indie games had just exploded exponentially. This robust inclusion of all sorts of interaction design, in this more academically framed path, than the hands on BA, gave me a vocabulary to be able to articulate and combine some very interesting, and motivating discoveries, which fueled my Master Thesis on the topic of the ways that we “read” both comic book panels, and the adventure game puzzles which i grew up with, among a plethora of other applications.
After I completed the MSc program, I essentially saw myself as a game dev generalist, and i immediately started to work my own ambitious projects that i been incubating since i was a kid. But after a year of struggling to properly organize around the scope and realities of making the games i wanted to make, i was lucky enough to find work with some very passionate and talented people interning as a level designer and soon later as a game designer. This professional teamwork not only taught me how to break the barriers of real-life production, that most inexperienced solo developers and artists like me faced without knowing it, but generously giving me the robust tools to do so.
Over the better part of the last decade, I enjoyed engaging in various forms of inventive problem solving as a designer, be it of gameplay, level, narrative, or system design , which have developed my skills and instincts to a point of solid confidence within my field.
Unafraid of how much of a platitude it reads, ever since i learned how to make pixels move with the press of a gamepad button, I aim to professionally craft the type of experiences that have made such a lasting impression on me, and helped shape me into the person I am today.