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Portfolio

Alexander Mistakidis' portfolio of games and consumer products, along with videos, gifs and detailed writeups.

VALORANT

Senior Technical Game Designer (Gameplay, combat and characters)
Oct 2021 - Mar 2024

VALORANT is a AAA tactical hero shooter.

  • Content focused role: Leveraged multi-disciplinary skills to push the frontier of gameplay, combat and characters from pitch to production.
  • Led design direction and craft mentorship for an unreleased project. Drove stakeholder alignment on execution and ramped up from solo to to dozens of developers over 3 product pods from prototype to production.
  • Experienced in pitching, prototyping and validating characters such as Harbor and Deadlock.
  • Shipped live service updates such as balancing Brimstone and reworking Jett.
VALORANT Jett Changes for Patch 4.08
The dashes, they are a changin.
Riot Games, Inc.
Deep Dive Into 4.04 Controller Agents Changes
Our Controller Agents got an overhaul in Patch 4.04. Our designers walk you through the hows and whys for each.
Riot Games, Inc.

Element Arena

Fun to watch, mobile-first competitive games.
August 2017 - April 2020

Element Arena was a multiplayer top-down fighting game with collectable heroes.

  • Led the raise of $1.2 million dollars from investors including Y Combinator and Riot Games.
  • Hired and managed a team of 10 game developers. Game credits here
  • Led game design: controls, combat design, monetization and battlepass design, level design with 7 published arenas, experiments with 12+ game modes, tutorial flow design with data-driven iterations
  • Directed art style, art feedback, budget and pipeline for the creation of a dozen stylized hero characters and environment art
  • Learned from >50 external play tests and 20 test-launched versions of the game to 60,000 players across SEA and North America.
Designing the Combat Meta in Element Arena
Version 1: The Ground Floor In the midst of startup chaos, me and my co-founder Carter started simple in August 2017: run and shoot deadly fireballs on a shrinking island where last one standing wins. We took 2 weeks to create a throwaway prototype with multiplayer networking. Our goal was
Alexander 'Zone' MistakidisAlexander Mistakidis
Combat Design: The Hook Class in Element Arena
Usually the hook character in MOBAs is a tough hulking character you don’t want to get close to. They use their hook to yank you close and make it your unlucky day. My contribution to the design space was to turn that archetype on it’s head. The goal was to
Alexander 'Zone' MistakidisAlexander Mistakidis
Level Design on Element Arena
We leveraged the design pattern of the ‘four-square’ layout, where there are three main connected paths. This is a design principle from Counter Strike map design, a game I played many thousand hours of. (Pictured below, and more by Valve here [https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/How_To_Develop_A_Map_That_Works…
Alexander 'Zone' MistakidisAlexander Mistakidis
Art Production on Element Arena - Part 1: Art Direction
Element Arena was a MOBA battle royale game with a stylized toon art style. I managed the art direction and pipeline, wrote the concept briefs and gave feedback on revisions. I found it really helpful to learn from the experience of others, so I wanted to give back now by breaking down how we operat…
Alexander 'Zone' MistakidisAlexander Mistakidis

Gamer Hub

Community focused social tools for live service games.
July 2019 - July 2020

Gamer Hub was a gaming content site that gives players the ability to create tier lists and guides for games they love.

  • In 12 months, grew to 4 million page views and 1.5 million visitors using organic SEO and social sharing.
  • The development was done by Alex Sohail, and I was the product lead.

Wisecrack

Play games together instantly with mobile-web group games.
January 2016 - July 2017

  • Programmed prototypes to play games together instantly with mobile-web group games.
  • Led designs for 3 game concepts, including Wisecrack, an outrageous party game that gives you crazy questions and the creative freedom to say what you want.
  • Led market testing and business development. Reached 10,000 users organically and tested multiple markets and games over one year.
  • Won the Velocity Fund Pitch Competition $5k and $25k grants

An example round of Wisecrack: the judge that round picks a prompt to read out, the other players answer, and then the judge picks their favorite.

Select Smaller Game Projects

Slimelord Siege by alexanderzone
Soulful Tower Defense for the GBA
itch.io

Created a ~2h tower defense game for the Gameboy Advance using C++

Deep Diver by alexanderzone
How deep can you go?
itch.io

Ludum Dare 48 Compo game made in Lua with Pico-8

Tiny’s Nut Garden by alexanderzone
A 3D push-puzzle game where you’re a squirrel growing nuts underground
itch.io

2 week game jam project in Unity