Avatar: Into The Inferno

I co-led the two-person design team from pre-production to gold master. In such a small team, my design responsibilities were critical and varied, covering every aspect of game design, including:

• Collaboratively designing the characters and their abilities to work together in harmony in various configurations, and seamlessly between single and multiplayer.
• Designing five levels with the in-house 3D level builder: from design white-box to second, third and final pass - playtesting at each step and iterating the design as I went. I also heavily playtested and subsequently polished and tweaked the first level.
• Designing two bosses: worked with coders and artists to implement the first and fourth bosses of the game.
• Designing and working with coders and artists to create the standalone competitive sports game - Ember Island Beach Volleyball. I was the sole designer of this side-game, from conception to completion.
• Creating and managing the product backlog. As Product Owner I worked closely with our manager to ensure each milestone was satisfied during the tight 10-month schedule.

Avatar: The Burning Earth

Features:

• Skill based combo system
• Teamwork based combat moves

I worked on this project during pre-production. For this time we were without a coder and so while the lead designer prepared the design doc for the publisher I produced flash prototypes of the combat moves.

Heatseeker PSP

*I was not involved in the design of this game.

This project gave me exposure to and familiarity with the Sony PSP hardware and production pipeline. I ported and updated the mission briefings that appear before each mission. I took existing flash files, reworked them into a manageable formula and built a process so that we could continue to easily update them as the changing specifications came through the wire.

Melonaut - winning entry of the 48 Hour Game Making Competition

I was the game designer of the SIF90 team in the 48 Hour Game Making Competition. We made Melonaut in response to the three keywords; watermelon, astronaut and summertime. We made the entire game, from conception to completion, in 48 hours.

"Best Game - Melonaut by SIF 90. Fantastic on all criteria - very well scoped for the time, really original use of seasons, and fun to play"

Judges: John Passfield (Pandemic), Yahtzee Crowshaw (Zero Punctuation), Gordon Moyes (Krome Studios) and Jackie Turnure (Hoodlum)

As the only designer in the team, I directed the team through the creative process of concept development. We followed an iterative and collaborative process: We wrote down all the things that came to mind when thinking of each word, then chose from the list the most useful for gameplay. We hit ideas around, chose the best one and started building. I focused the team on getting a prototype as quickly as possible, and once we had it, I kept the team focused on building incrementally till we had a fun playable. On the second night, we wrote a 'tweak list' and spent the last 12 hours polishing.

SIF90 team: Simon Joslin (design), Tom Killen (code), Szevvy (code), Matt Clark (code), Jon McEwan (code) and Joe Gatling (art).

Gameplay visualisation research at QUT, funded by Microsoft

Scholarships: QUT Vacation Research Scholarship Scheme 2006
Awards: Best Paper in CyberGames 2006
Presented at: CGIE2006
Published in: ACM

Quote from the Research Students Centre magazine:

"Interesting Snippet of information - the rewards of the Vacation Scholarship Scheme
Simon Joslin, a final year student in IF90 B CI (COM DESIGN)/B INF TECH received a best paper award from CGIE 2006. The paper was titled Modelling Quest Data for Game Designers. Simon has been asked to submit the paper to the ACMIE journal. Simon was a vacation scholarship student and, according to his supervisors, wrote the paper with little help from them (Ross Brown and Penny Drennan). Congratulations, Simon!"

SCOOT 2006

In 2006 I participated again in the design and production of games for Scoot 2006, a location based game (LBG). Scoot ran over five Melbourne sites including the Museum, ACMI and NGV. This time round, I designed and implemented two games; an augmented reality game (ARG) and a multiple site game that brought participants together in a multiplayer challenge.

The first game shown to the right is Balloon Slam, players throw a ball at the balloons projected on the wall. The more they hit the more points they get.

The second game is a multisite multiplayer competitive game where the two teams are connected by video stream and attempt to outdo each other in a simple timing game.

SCOOT 2004

In 2004 I designed three virtual games to compliment SCOOT 2004, a location based game (LBG). The three games were my first foray into designing and programming flash games in a professional context. I worked nonstop to turn out three games in one month, including art, design and code.

Although I would design these games differently now, they showcase my ability to produce something different and that even as an inexperienced designer I possessed designer sensibility.