Daniel Tvete - Game Designer

Welcome to my Portfolio!

I’m an experienced Game and Level Designer for mobile games spanning many genres. I have worked on highly successful titles such as Coin Dozer, Match 3D, and Match Tile 3D. I also have experience doing freelance game and level design for puzzle and match-3 games and an extensive background in Quality Assurance.
While my primary passion within design lies in level design, I have experience designing core game loops, meta-game systems, monetization systems, data and balance sheets, monitoring game health, and rapid prototyping. I am experienced working in both scrum and agile environments.

Wasteland Hero (2024)

This is the first action game I worked on as a designer and by far the most ambitious of the market test games I worked on for Lion Studios given the development time and team resources we had. My main responsibilities included; defining player weapons, enemies, environments required, and the number of levels required for the market test. I worked closely with the environment designer to pick out the game assets required and helped tweak and design the game levels before I placed enemy spawns, pathing, and interactable objects. Along with another designer, I defined the core and meta game systems, and helped balanced the game’s economy. Working with Engineers, I defined the level configuration tool used to create the enemy wave spawning. Besides my main design duties, I worked alongside Art, Engineers and Tech Artists in Unity, tweaking various game aspects to help the production pipeline and meet deadlines.

Notable contributions:

Helped design and balance core and meta systems
Designed all levels for the initial market test
Collaborated with Engineers in developing the game’s level configuration tool
Assisted the development team in various tasks to expedite development time, in implementing, adjusting and balancing aspects such as VFX, SFX, camera, UX pacing, and environmental design in Unity

Tap Jam (2024)

In Tap Jam I was in charge of level & puzzle design, and core game mechanics. I helped lead the project from ideation to market test along with our pod’s PM. I hand-coded the majority of the levels we had for the market test, and defined the UX and functionality of the puzzle mechanics for the ‘Mystery Tiles’, ‘Tile Spawners’, ‘Special Shaped Tiles’, ‘Jelly Tiles’ and ‘Frozen Tiles’.

Notable contributions:

Helped design and lead the game’s vision from ideation to market test
Designed dozens of levels for the initial market test
Helped design the game’s new innovative genre, combining Sorting and Match games
Defined the core game puzzle mechanics and their UX

Triple Match 2D (2024)

My main role was leading the overall design, level design, and communicating the project’s vision. I was responsible for determining the project’s scope and what we needed for a market fit test, defining the core gameplay mechanics, design the sticker book meta system. I worked closely with Art to define and design the game’s stickers and match elements to ensure they fit the shapes, colors, and themes we wanted for each sticker book. I worked closely with Engineers to define the game’s unique game mechanics, such as the ‘nested objects’ (If you match 3 of a sticker, it may produce one or more new stickers on the board), the match combo mechanics, the in-level boosts, and the purchasable boosts. I also worked with Engineers to define and design the level design tool, which was crucial to maintaining the desired control over the semi-procedurally generated levels. On the data side, I monitored player funnels and D1 retention to ensure early levels were fine-tuned based on player behavior.

Notable contributions:

Helped design and lead the game’s vision from ideation to market test
Worked closely with art to handcraft hundreds of level asset and achieve an appealing visual style to match the game’s vision
Designed dozens of levels for the initial market test
Designed a level development tool in collaboration with engineers, cutting the time it took to design levels by more than half.
Designed new, fun and innovative triple-match mechanics and meta systems never before seen in the genre

Match Tile 3D (2023)

I was leading the design shift of the game’s levels from being more of a hidden object game to a triple match game by creating levels with a strong and playful theme, and a pleasing visual design. I also did extensive market research in the triple match genre to understand what made for more exciting levels, both from a visual experience and a gameplay experience. I worked closely with artists to create hundreds of new assets that followed more exciting themes and had a binding visual aesthetic to recreate the game’s early levels. By doing so, we increased the D0 and D1 retention and drove up early use of RV offers.

Notable contributions:

Designed hundreds of levels for the core game

Collaborated with artists in creating brand-new Match 3D game assets
Extensive market research in the Match 3D genre to improve early game retention and increased RV monetization

Match 3D (2023)

I started helping out by designing dozens of special challenge levels players could interact with via a new seasonal event that was being implemented into the game. These levels also helped inform us of future pivots in how we wanted to design levels for the Match Tile 3D game, reducing the number of unique match objects, and instead focusing on creating visually pleasing levels with a strong theme to them. Additionally, these levels felt far more interactive as the gameplay and pacing shifted from looking for a few duplicate objects to instead making rapid matches to clear the board, creating a much more enjoyable experience.

Notable contributions:

Designed hundreds of levels for the core game, and dozens of special levels for the game’s special events.
Collaborated with artists in creating brand-new Match 3D game assets
Created complex spreadsheet formulas for rapidly designing new levels, reducing redundant tasks

Unannounced Game (2023)

Game Circus llc

My main role on this project was designing and implementing a variety of core game systems and features while collaborating closely with the development team, including the product team and other designers. I was directly involved with designing ‘project-agnostic’ features, core game loop iterations and improvements, social login flows, several UI/UX improvements and helped analyze and deliver actionable items from several usertesting sessions.

One of the biggest challenges with this project was that this is a server-based game with a focus on the dev and design team to be able to make live updates and changes to the game without requiring the players to update the game, as well as avoiding causing bugs or errors to users when we push the live changes. Several of the features and data sheets I designed had to take this in account, adding another layer of complexity to their under-the-hood functionality.

Notable contributions:

Created a ‘game-agnostic’ pop-up and promotion feature that allowed the design and product team to easily customize what and when pop-ups, IAPs and free offers can appear throughout the game.
Designed the logic flow of a social login system.
Several improvements to the UI/UX of the core game loop to improve player usability and communication.
Performed deep-dive research into game flow, game balance and UI/UX of critically successful competitive games on the market, delivering actionable items to help boost early-game retention and engagement.
Collaborative prototyping with a small strike team to explore various improvements to our secondary game loops.

Rumble Match (2021)

Project Flight School llc

Worked as a Freelance Designer with primary focus on creating new and rebalancing existing Match-3 levels.

Notable contributions:

Designed 20+ levels.
Rebalanced 100+ levels.
Provided general design feedback on core game loop and monetization.

Shark Tank Tycoon (2021)

Game Circus llc, Sony Entertainment

Shark Tank Tycoon was a collaboration project with Sony Pictures on a game adaptation for the international hit TV show Shark Tank. My main role on this project was assisting the Lead Designer with various tasks ranging from making misc improvements to the game’s LTV, supporting the implementation of new in-game events to implementing the entrepreneur pitch minigame.

Notable contributions:

Implemented and balanced 2 in-game events
Collaborated with Lead Designer on designing the core entrepreneur pitch minigame
Designed the spreadsheets and dialog system for the entrepreneur pitch minigame
Helped write dialog for the entrepreneur pitch minigame

Coin Dozer (2020)

Game Circus llc

Coin Dozer Sweepstakes was the first project I was involved in as an associate designer. My primary role in the project was initially to assist the Lead Designer with various smaller design tasks. The implementation of the Seasonal Pass feature was my first major feature implementation where I was directly collaborating with programmers, artists and QA for its release.

Notable contributions:

Designed and helped implement the Seasonal Pass feature.
Responsible for rebalancing and pushing 13 live events.

Responsible for a series of improvements to the UI/UX of the Fortune Wheel system, improving the userfacing of the monetization aspects of the Seasonal Pass and several misc. main game HUD improvements and QOL changes from a Design aspect.

Other Experience & Projects

Rapid Prototyping (2022)
Game Circus llc

Worked as a designer on a 4-person team to create several rapid prototypes in Unity within a 12-week period, spanning genres such as merge, TD, action shooter and AR simulation game. The goal of these prototypes was to aid design research on game mechanics and UX for potential future games for Game Circus.

My main role on these projects was taking our initial rough ideas and turning them into core game loop interactions, playtesting and providing feedback during development, as well as tweaking the game’s input values until we had a game flow that represented our vision. I would take the team’s input and feedback during development and determine if and how we could incorporate it into our prototypes to improve them further. I created mockups and wireframes during the pre-production of each project to ensure we were all aligned on the ideas, loops and interactions. I also designed the UI/UX structures and layouts.

Worked as Design support during pre-production of an unannounced Idler game in collaboration with an undisclosed 3rd party and a 2nd-party team (RM2 Digital).

My role was attending daily meetings, staying up to date with the progress, supporting the 2nd party team with any design review and feedback in the project, and wireframes and mockups during pre-production.

Design Support (2022)
Game Circus llc

Design Support (2022)
Project Flight School llc

Worked as Design support during pre-production of an unannounced Idler game in collaboration with an undisclosed 3rd party and a 2nd-party team (RM2 Digital).

My role was attending daily meetings, staying up to date with the progress, supporting the 2nd party team with any design review and feedback in the project, and wireframes and mockups during pre-production.