Tristan Lee Johnson

I'm an Australian writer and game designer who's been creating stories for as long as I've been able to string coherent thoughts together and playing video games as soon as I could operate a mouse and keyboard. After interacting with various video games throughout my life, I concluded that video games served the perfect medium to facilitate engagement with a narrative. Video games afford a player direct influence within a fictional world where otherwise they could only be an observer.

This incredible capacity of video games eventually led me into game development, and it is now a field I am deeply passionate about. Ultimately, my goal in developing video games is for people that play my games to be able to experience the same sense of joy and wonder that I have experienced in the games I love.

Since early childhood I've been enraptured by grand mythos and otherworldly creatures. This has stuck with me into my adult life, as many of my works of creative fiction are horror or dark fantasy. I enjoy setting my pieces in older time periods where my characters are isolated and ill-equipped to face the great threats of their worlds. One of the reasons for this is that I believe you can only truly understand a character once you see them tested.

Overall, the struggle of the protagonist through conflict is most important to me in a story. This conflict need not be physical, and this concept of struggle is shared even amongst my stories grounded in more realistic settings.

My primary skills in game development are in game design and narrative design, and I have made contributions in these areas in much of the projects I've been a part of. Finding the spark for an interesting and enjoyable core gameplay loop is a truly mystical feeling for me. Once the core mechanics of a game become clear, I aim to reinforce those mechanics in my designs throughout the development pipeline. Along the way, I strive to make my worlds and characters work in tandem with the mechanics of the games they inhabit, rather than simply being presented alongside them.

Besides game design and narrative design, I've designed and constructed levels through the Godot engine's tilemap and gridmap nodes for 2D and 3D games respectively. After having utilised a variety of nodes in Godot, I've built up a basic understanding in the GDscript programming language as well. I've also been the project manager in some games I've worked on, which has helped give me a better grasp of scope and what is achievable based on the skillsets in a team and deadlines set. Additionally, I've dabbled with 3D modelling in Maya and Blender, and some audio design in Adobe Audition and Waveform 13.