Welcome!

Hello! I am Orkun Ozkan, a Game Designer/Systems Designer with a passion for how mechanics can empower player expression and shape unique experiences.

Power Match is a match-3 mobile game created in Unity for Good Job Games (https://www.goodjobgames.com/). Created with a team of 20 interns during Summer 2025.

My primary role was: Product Manager
My secondary roles were: Lead Game Designer, Producer, Art Director

Synopsis: Power Match is a match-3 mobile game that uses special combos and power-ups and includes an in-game currency shop. The overall gameplay goal is the same as other match-3 games - clear the board in a finite number of moves. Our design was unique in that the player uses combos of tiles to clear the board in the fewest moves possible. 

Design Tasks
- Core global gameplay
- Playable Tile mechanics design, tuning, and balancing (power-ups, obstacles, and all other playable tiles)
- Tile interaction modeling and tuning
- Procedural Tile placement tuning
- Level design (25 out of 100)

Production Tasks
- Led weekly sprints
- Led regular developer team meetings
- Trello instance management

Art Direction Tasks
- Thematic design
- Tile selection and alignment with global thematic direction
- Designed thematic specs for art team

Challenges and Lessons Learned
1.
- Problem: No prior experience with match-3 games: lost too much time developing thematic elements instead of gameplay
- Solution: Divide team into traditional studio roles (Design, Programming, Art) and focus on design first. Dedicated meetings about theme would wait until design was solidified.
2.
- Problem: Flat organizational structure created paralysis
- Solution: I volunteered to act as a facilitator to establish zones of responsibility and a production pipeline between each zone
3.
- Problem: Entire team was unaquainted with one another and were not all from a game development background
- Solution: Early on, I created social events like movie nights and Dungeons & Dragons to help us get comfortable with each other

Valeria the Pagan Priestess is a dark fantasy action platformer with fluid hack-and-slash combat and RPG elements. Explore a vast overworld map, rolling back the fog of war to discover dozens of unique locations, from towns and caravans to carefully crafted side-scrolling stages.

I work as the Game Designer of the team, creating levels, enemies, gameplay features, and many other design elements, like the menus. The game has a small core team of 7 members. The game also has a huge social media following on X/Twitter and Patreon, with many people backing the project. The game has some demo versions for Patreon supporters, but the release date of the game is not finalized right now.

I can not talk about diving deeper into my contributions as the game is yet to be released, but I faced many difficulties, including a language barrier and work culture. Everyone on the team other then me is from Argentina, and some of the members don't even speak English. We had to use tools or get from other members of the team to break this speaking barrier.

https://store.steampowered.com...

LightYear Library is a runner game where players, as space librarians, navigate various worlds to deliver books. The idea was born from my taught of what if a runner game had more lanes. The game has an easy gameplay loop, you have a 3x3 grid instead of 3 lanes, and you just dodge the meteors. We had 4 people working on this project, which was made in Unity.

I was in charge of:

• Created the 3x3 grid system
• Designed and made the level layouts in Unity engine.
• Managed team workflow with Jira, organized sprints, and facilitated scrum meetings.

Obstacles that I faced and how I dealt with them:

• This was my first official project in Unity, which I had to learn, which didn't take while as I am a fast learner and I greatly enjoyed Unity.
  
  

Boomstick is a dynamic, movement-centric arena shooter that challenges players to move, shoot, and look cool doing it! As Boomguy, a robot with amnesia, you'll run, jump, and shoot through vibrant levels to uncover your lost memories. The main focus of the project is to make a game that consumers of the movement shooter genre can enjoy.

I was in charge of:

• Designed and refined the core mobility features, focusing on how players can express themselves with movement mechanics.
• Developed a variety of unique weapons.
• Led the project using tools like Jira and Confluence, coordinating a team of nine through bi-weekly sprints.
  Created and maintained detailed design documents to ensure clarity and coherence.

Obstacles that I faced and how I dealt with them:

• We didn't have any artists on the team, which is why we had to go with a wireframe look.
• The game was originally planned to be an online arena shooter with expressive movement mechanics, but since this was our first online game, we had trouble with replication, so I had to make the hard decision of pivoting to level level-based PVE game with the movement mechanics.