Game Design Consulting
Guidance Towards Realizing Your Vision
Who Am I? Alexander Thumm, PhD, CEO and Founder of Lamplight Forest. Experienced game designer, gameplay programmer, art director, game writer, sound designer and game audio expert. My Game Design Advice and Consulting expertise is available to both beginners and established studios. Exploring Your Goals By applying "big picture" expertise you'll be empowered to define and refine your game holistically, to see it from a birds-eye-view and understand how all the pieces fit together to give your players the best experience possible, and the experience that aligns with your vision. You'll be guided to identify key strengths, weaknesses and unrealized potentials of your design roadmap. This can help: • ensure you start a project from the strongest foundation possible • identify as early as possible what should be set in stone and what can be flexible, so you have the latitude to explore new ideas as they present themselves during development • tease out unrealized potentials to help highlight your unique voice and unique selling point • if you're already well into a project, I can provide fresh perspective and help to identify specific challenges and problems in order remove creative roadblocks. Defining a problem is 50% of solving it! • help to refine the user experience of your design, to ensure that constraints, affordances, player-feedback and UIs are clear and concise • if you are pitching or preparing to pitch to publishers we can explore whether your demo, pitch and trailers are aligning with your creative vision Q: If I'm a beginner, can you still help? A: Yes! I can help you plan your first project, get started with Unity, basic coding with C#, the basics of audio-interactivity in Wwise, and much more. BUT even for a total beginner I recommend a focus on game design first, i.e. clearly defining your vision. Your learning will be much more focused and rewarding if you have a clear picture of what you aim to achieve, and this will also give you a much stronger foundation for the future Q: If I'm based in a different city/area can you still help? A: Yes! Depending on your location I can provide: • remote consultation via email, Skype, etc, anywhere in world • face-to-face consulting if you're in the Adelaide area Specialized Knowledge I can offer specialized knowledge that includes, but is not limited to*: • holistic game design: zooming out and identifying how all the parts of your game are fitting together. Exploring how this aligns with your vision of what you want your players to experience • art direction: unifying you and your team, establishing clear communication and clearly defined roles, creating something beautiful/powerful/impactful • interactive music: designing musical puzzles and challenges, exploring new forms of music-based gameplay (beyond the rhythm game), exploring different approaches to interactive music • narrative design: including for open-world, interactive fiction, and adventure games • storytelling through gameplay: allowing a core-game-loop to evolve to tell its own story over the course of a game • hybrid gameplay approaches: exploring how different kinds of gameplay can co-exist within a single game in an interdependent way, to provide contrast, uniqueness, and diversity. • puzzle and progression design: including linear, and non-linear approaches (and combining the two), developing tutorials for players, and the when/where/how of using puzzle-dependency charts, meaningful and non-addictive ethical progression systems • grid-based puzzle design (including "match3/falling-block" and "sokoban" types) • navigation and player-gating: the what/why/when/where/how of guiding players through your game * While I have a wealth of experience with Unity, C#, and Wwise, I stress that my services are focused on big-picture game design, planning, clarifying and executing on your vision, and NOT on the nitty-gritty of programming, technical art, or audio integration. My Experience • over 5 years in the game industry as Founder and Creative Lead of Lamplight Forest, where I've been project lead, art director, puzzle and narrative designer and gameplay programmer on the revolutionary musical adventure game Pallas of Vines • a PhD in music technologies for video games, and a multi-award-winning scholar • I've been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern California's renowned Game Innovation Lab • I've presented talks at international game and academic conferences including Unite LA, and Montreal International Game Summit • I have designed, programmed and art-directed games in many genres including free-roaming 3rd person adventures, puzzle-platformers, falling-block/match3s, sokobans/grid-based-puzzlers, interactive fiction, adventure games, and more, almost always with a musical twist |
I'm passionate about games and I'd love to hear from you! Click the button below, fill out the contact form and we can explore your needs for bringing your vision to life!