Pyre Kavanagh
Game Designer | Writer
About me
Hi there.
I'm Pyre, a game designer and writer.I like to work on weird and wonderful games that bring a lot of joy to a specific target audience.
Game Design
You can find some of the games I have worked on over here.
Journalism
You can find various features and reviews that I've written here.
Miscelaenous
Other projects I've worked on can be found here.
About Me
I am currently studying for an Advanced Diploma in Game Design and Production at AIE.
I have already achieved a Diploma of Visual Arts and a Diploma of Screen and Media as a prerequisite to this.
I've been writing for Noisy Pixel, a video game journalism site for seven years.
I have experience in using Unreal Engine, SRPG Studio, RPG Maker, Python and experience in creating and maintaining various production documents connected to their development.
Game Design
Graverobbers
Graverobbers is a first person Horror VR game developed in Unreal Engine for the VR unit at AIE in a group of 5 people. I designed systems for the game, designed the map, various background assets and wrote the main script and flavour text.
Map Design Production Process
The map for the game was originally designed by with concepts being sketched out on paper for indivdual sections of the map. These sections were then placed together, before being fused into one drawn map. From there, the map was translated into 3 with a greybox in blender, where we discovered various faults with the design and made further changes before creating the design in Unreal Engine.
Cyber Samurai
This game was my major production in my course at AIE. Developed in Unreal Engine 5 over the course of 2 terms by 5 people with lots of life commitments, Cyber Samurai is an action roguelike where you carve your way through a factory via breaking down doors and destroying the robots trying to destroy you.I designed game systems, maps for, and organised and implemented animations.
Map Design Production Process and Problem Solving
In testing, we were discovering that the levels were rather samey and repetitive. The player wasn't forced to navigate very far at all, and the player could easily position themselves in a way to be unimpeded whilst destroying the objective.So we needed to create a level that prevented the player from doing this whilst encouraging more movement than before.
To do this I worked on a design that would satisfy the criteria of preventing that player strategy and would create interesting movement.This level design fufills this criteria by using verticality. The player moves to the topmost section to destroy the door, whilst a shield generator and health pack generators force the player to descend back down should the door be guarded or the player need healing.
Combat Design
I used various animations provided and checked over by our animator to create complex and intricate attack animations and tweaking them to exist within the game.The combat used a simple warriors game-like system (Dynasty Warriors), wherein a player would chain light attacks together until the main chain ended or they wished to interupt the attacks with a heavy attack.
Journalism
At Noisy Pixel, I specialize in editorial production and web content writing.Here are some key features, as well as games that have my words on their steam pages.
Before Among Us and Gnosia: Why Lost Dimension Is Still the Ultimate Suspense JRPG
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy Review – Putting Myself Through The Torment Nexus One Hundred Times
Noisy Pixel Staff Picks: Pyre’s Top 5 Games of 2024
Pokémon Legends Z-A Review – A Real-Time Evolution of the Franchise
Misc.
UX Design Project
PC Realm Building App
Developed in Figma by a team of 3, the PC Realm building app, is a UX design project developed as part of my AIE studies. It's a prototype that covers all of the components that would be required for the development of such an application.
Production For Clients Project
Samantha No More
Developed in Unreal Engine 4, Samantha No More was an AIE project for Client production. In this unit, students had to design for a production brief.
This brief was to create a prototype for a game that tied in to a fictional ongoing TV Drama called 'Samantha No More'. It involves two characters looking for the missing Samantha, but run into trouble.In my submission, this trouble comes in the form of 'I replicated all of the mechanics from Slender: The Eight Pages' but in a different engine. You and a companion character are stalked through the woods by a mystery being that is doing something to you, whilst you look for a way to get into the tower.