My name is Octavian Micu and I'm a game designer. I approach the craft as a holistic discipline, and as a result I like to treat levels, systems and narrative as one connected problem. A player never meets a mechanic or a story on its own; they experience the space those things build together, and that space is what I'm good at designing.

Most of my attention goes to spatial design, exploration, and the systems that make a world feel alive, or at least worth investigating. I like treating the player as an archaeologist who gets to learn about the world by paying attention, not a tourist walked past the sights. I want the spaces players explore to feel like real places, not a corridor of set pieces.

I'm comfortable with most of the process, from layout and systems to environment mockups, asset creation, and prototyping in Unity and Unreal. I'm not as strong on the art side as I want to be yet, but it's something I genuinely enjoy learning and getting better at.

§ Personal Statement

A lot of what I know about design I picked up outside games. Cinema is one of my favorite things, and so I've picked up a lot of techniques on how cinematic tools can build a mood or pull a feeling out of you. I also love writing, so I try to give even the small details in my games a bit of story to carry. I strongly believe a game shouldn't force you to learn anything, but should let you learn as much as you want to. The games that inspired me most are Dark Souls III and Shadow of the Colossus. I played them as a kid, before I could really parse what they were asking of me, and they dropped me into these worlds that never stopped to explain themselves. I was stranded in them, and it felt so real that it never quite left me. That feeling, of a place that trusts you to find your own footing, is the one I keep chasing in my own work.

I just wrapped my work on The Hunt, a two-person soulslike roguelike project in Unreal, where knowledge replaces stats and the player slowly becomes the thing they were afraid of. It's the project I used to push hardest on what I believe, and finishing it has me looking for the next big thing to build. If you're building something that puts space and curiosity at its center, I'd like to hear about it.