About Me
I am Kean Fai (Keff), a game designer with 5 years of experience in game design, sound design and project management. My passion lies in translating ideas into reality, by uniting talents from multiple technical and artistic departments to create immersive experiences together.
Apart from the “serious” game production life, I enjoy fiddling around with smaller side projects once in a while to push my boundaries and make sure I am properly informed and able to practice what I preach.
Check out my work below, and reach out if you’ve got any questions for me!
Projects
3D Mobile multiplayer brawler
Buddy Arena (2024)
Roles: Game Designer, Game Producer, Sound Designer
This project required me to fill larger shoes rapidly, expanding from my original role as Game Designer into other crucial roles, such as Game Producer and Sound Designer. This gave me a clear overview of the coordination and work required behind developing a multiplayer live-ops game, and what it takes to keep it afloat in today’s competitive market.
- Maintained the Game Design Document
- Designed and balanced combat systems
- Designed reward progression and monetization systems
- Designed rank points calculation system (MMR)
- Designed Play-to-airdrop event during launch
- Designed and reviewed gameplay data metrics to track and save
- Managed, created, and implemented sound effects and background music
- Managed project timeline leading up to launch
- Handled mobile release on android and apple app stores
Platform: Mobile
Tools: Unity, C#, GIT, Amplitude, Playfab, Ableton Live, FMOD
Management Tools: Confluence, JIRA, Google Sheets
3D First-person Action Adventure
R0N1N (2022)
Roles: Programmer (C#), Level Designer, Narrative Designer, Enemy AI Designer, Music Composer, Sound Designer
Designing a great story experience is not unlike directing a film. By fleshing out a concrete screenplay, it allowed the entire team to quickly visualize what the game was about and helped inform decisions to build better levels, sounds, and gameplay features to elicit the right player emotions.
- Created and maintained the Game Design Document
- Wrote screenplay containing all gameplay events, cinematics, and dialogue lines
- Built 3x 3D game levels in a custom game engine
- Designed 4x enemy AI State Machines, worked with tech on linking up pathfinding and physics
- Motion Capture Actor using a Rokoko Smartsuit, then cleaned up animations through Maya
- Managed, created, and implemented sound effects and background music
- Rapid prototyping of levels
Platform: PC
Tools: Custom Engine, Unity, C#, GIT, Rokoko, Maya, Audacity, Cakewalk, FMOD
procedural Narrative Generator
Hunter’s Trail (2022)
Roles: Programmer (C#), Game Designer, Writer
This project had me programming a custom tool that could take in large amounts of data to churn out story scenarios, while maintaining enough control as a designer to maintain a consistent experience each playthrough. This helped me understand the needs and frustrations of both the tools user and developer, and how to better manage expectations between designers, gameplay programmers and tools programmers.
- Custom procedural generation tool
- 100+ Storylets
- UI Art and implementation
Platform: PC
Tools: Unity, C#
2D Reverse Horror Top-down Adventure
Unkindled (2021)
Roles: Game Designer, Level Designer, Narrative Designer, Enemy AI Designer, Music Composer, Sound Designer
“Reverse horror” was an intriguing premise to explore: the game should make the player understand that they are terrifying and everyone is afraid of them, without scaring the players themselves. We had to tackle this by using NPC’s behaviours, dialogue lines, audio, and really visceral impact of the player’s attacks to pull off this power fantasy.
- Created and maintained the Game Design Document
- Rapid prototyping of gameplay mechanics
- Built 4x 2D levels in a custom game engine
- Designed 2x enemy AI State Machines, worked with tech on implementation
- Implemented adaptive horizontal re-sequencing and vertical re-orchestration for music soundtracks
- Created sound effects using Audacity and Cakewalk, and implemented them
Platform: PC
Tools: Custom Engine, Unity, C#, GIT, Audacity, Cakewalk, FMOD
Game Jams
