Oskar Lazar : : System Designer – Programmer

For the mb21-award-winning game “Moko”, I designed the core game loop around an intuitive risk and reward mechanic, wrote the code for the player controller, designed a narrative, dabbled in procedural map generation, and finally painted some leafs.

In “Shellycoat”, I developed the main movement patterns and input revolving around wallruns, slides, and dashes, as well as the architecture and user experience for respawn points, level selection, settings, and more.

My bachelor’s thesis “SorcerAI” revolves around resource managment and the training of a blackbox-like artificial intelligence. The game is designed to challenge a player’s mathematics, risk assessment, and cognitive ability to present data in sets that are useful to a neural network.

During my work at Karma Games I learned valuable lessons about production, running a tightly-nit team, funding, manufacturing, playtesting, design processes of highly complex strategy games and even manageurial tasks such as interviewing and hiring.

In this level design project, I focussed on a steady and managable learning curve, introducing increasingly complex mechanics and levels over time.

For the gloomy “Obscrete” I created a player controller that can be adjusted to walk into any direction: walls, ceilings, crooked angles, anything. Furthermore, I designed the final level and took the role of a producer.

Self-hosted LLM implementation using Python, FastAPI and Unity for NPC conversations.

In this experimental shooter, 2 players face off in an area control competition. Whoever has more flowers on a desert tile wins that tile, unlocking a respective tile on the fractured shared split screen. This idea, and its technical implementation using render targets were my key contributions to this game jam.

In this game jam, I was pivotal in streamlining our process and scope, allowing for a finished and confined game, that simulates strains of thought in the inbetween state of falling asleep. The goal is to find emotionally relevant thoughts and resolve them to get a good night’s sleep.

In stonesight, players use their eyes to stack stones. This simple challenge turns into a meditative excercise. All you need to do is slow down and focus.

For Monochroma, I blocked out a city to vandalize and do freerunning in and implemented an elegant interaction pattern that seamlessly combines various inputs.

This game about circular economy and the recycling of plastic went through rapid pototyping within days. A pace I was committed to keeping up until we found a working system design to expand on.

As the name suggests, this 1-day gamejam is an autorunner. We set a realistic scope for our limited timespan and were able to finish a mini-game adhering to our expectations.