Stefan Octavian Micu

Open-world desert adventure pitched to a Dragon's Den panel

• Only designer on a six-person team of three artists and two programmers, owning the design vision from concept through a three-week vertical slice.
• Designed and documented the core systems, such as sand-surfing traversal, colossus encounters, and a knowledge-based progression model where advancement comes from player knowledge.
• Built the open-world layout and specified the Temple of the Solstice Flame as the slice target, directing ruin architecture and enemy priorities with the art team.
• Selected as one of the top 5 projects in the university and pitched in a Dragon's Den format, supported by competitive analysis, market positioning, and a scoped MVP plan.

Kiosk game built from children's drawings for a public exhibition

• Designed and shipped a kiosk game for children aged 6 to 12, exhibited publicly at the Library of Enschede under a client brief and a fixed exhibition deadline.
• Designed a collection of themed mini-games from children's hand-drawn monsters, each built around a single mechanic a child could grasp in one attempt.
• Designed onboarding for unsupervised play: minimal text, visual affordances, and a first-thirty-seconds flow a six-year-old can clear without an adult.
• Ran playtest sessions with children in 3 classrooms and iterated the build with the library team across 5 review rounds.

Horror roguelike where mastering the game turns the player into the thing to fear

• Sole designer on a two-person team, owning the systems, progression, combat structure, events, and balancing for a vertical slice built in Unreal Engine.
• Designed a knowledge-based progression system across a roguelike board and first-person areas, where players advance through what they learn about the world and its monsters rather than through stats. Built and functioning in the slice, still under test.
• Designed a two-mode combat system, open movement and locked close-quarters exchanges, over shared stamina and per-enemy parry timings, alongside undisclosed systems such as fog that thins across runs so the player grows from prey to predator without being told.
• Built the environments, props, and atmosphere in Blender, Substance Painter, and Unreal's material graph, and authored the item and UI event classes in Blueprints.