Damien Bel

Game Designer

"Systems and Narrative, two sides of the same coin: Story."

Professional Experience

RPG Expert

Familiar with making and playing a large horizon of role-playing-games, their systems and how to tell stories within them. I love being innovative while crafting a tailored experience that stays coherent between game and narrative.

Story Focus

No matter if I'm designing systems or writing texts, I'm always asking myself: What meaning does this interaction have ? What is the right tone, player goal or mode of interaction to build a memorable and meaningful moment ?

Hands-on Designer

Experienced with blueprint coding and cinematic integration, I know how to work in engine. I can even whip out my skills as a former art student to convey designs, draw mockups, storyboards, or pretty-up a presentation.

Practical & Emotional Intelligence

I have stepped in the role of a leader when I had to resolve conflicts, build and coordinate a team. My experience outside of gaming as an emotional and physical therapist have given me great tools to listen and find the root cause of issues.

3+ Years Making Games

4 Shipped Products

100+ Happy Coworkers

12 Awards

Announced at the Summer Games Fest show 2023, Lysfanga: The Time-Shift Warrior is adapted from an award-winning student game, later published by Quantic Dream Spotlight.

Praised by both the press and players for its innovative gameplay, Lysfanga mixes puzzle mechanics alongside a traditional Action-RPG core, in which Imë, champion of the Goddess of Time, utilizes clones of herself to repeat and solve combat encounters against hordes of demons to find her brother and save the world.

ADAPTED FROM:

PEGASES 2022 BEST STUDENT GAME WINNER

79%

LYSFANGA: THE TIME-SHIFT WARRIOR

NARRATIVE DESIGNER:

Arrived mid-production to bring the Director's story outline to the finish line.
Defined character backgrounds and voices.
Fleshed out the universe and wrote 200+ entries of in-game lore text.
Designed and integrated over 50 cutscenes in Unity Engine + other in-game narrative elements.
Wrote dialog.
Participating in voice acting casting and recording sessions.
Coordinated with external translators for 9+ languages.
Being the principal caretaker of the narrative after the director, I enjoyed a lot of autonomy and room for initiative during production.
Taking a leadership position, I assembled and coordinated a cinematic team with a programmer, an animator, sound designer, and an additional cinematic designer whom I trained.

Received Praise from the Director: "The best reviewed parts of the story are the ones Damien wrote on his own; I wish I let him reboot the narrative and make it his own !"

Learn more >>

I arrived at Dontnod Entertainment making my teeth on the post-launch content of Life is Strange 2 before joining the production of Tell me Why; both ended up winning a slew of awards for the bravery and outstanding delivery of their narrative, and I've been very proud to be a small part of these achievements.

84%

LIFE IS STRANGE 2

QA TESTER:

Used JIRA, PERFORCE & CONFLUENCE to navigate a large-size team, learning the roles of each person to send quality assurance tickets to the right people.
Performed smoke tests.
Proposed test plans to a team of 6 QA members.
Took the initiative to address bits of contents that might have been offensive to some portions of players in a game about inclusion.

TELL ME WHY

81%

+3 MORE

Story-Rich

Team of ~75

GAMES FOR IMPACT WINNER

+2 MORE

LUA was a passion project I joined in which I was able to bridge my 2 passions: tech / gaming and "tantra" / consciousness. They often seem like oil and water, despite that, yet have much to gain by being together. The project had a wholesome mission but was too niche at the time to find the mass of people and investment needed to sustain a social platform.

My intuition was that LUA should have been an events platform first - In its target community, a dating app is installed some of the time by some people, whereas an events app would have been installed all of the time by all people. Moreover, there is a real pain point for events organizers using online ticket sellers, and bringing people together at real events often accomplishes the goal of creating relationships even better than a dating app would.

Phone app

LUA: DATING WITH DEPTH

GAMIFICATION EXPERT:

Built maquettes in FIGMA to propose new ways of interaction in the social platform, inspired by real festival games.
Found UX issues and built solutions.
Innovated in the remote-work practices of the company to streamline communication and workflows.
Participated in user research and interviews.

Social

Team < 10

PERSONAL PROJECTS

CONCEPTS, PAPER & DIGITAL PROTOTYPES, EXISTING GAMES REDESIGNS

DIGITAL PROTOTYPES

The Witch of Xangdebaar

Solo prototype taking off from the base of Project Changeling, going deeper into social infiltration mechanics with Unreal Engine blueprints.

Project Changeling

Prototype for innovative social infiltration mechanics. I was the principal system and quest designer in a team of 5, in which we achieved a 30-minute playable demo of a narrative RPG immersive-sim in 2 months.

Grailer

Gerard the angry templar is furiously looking for his missing master in dungerous dungeons. A fun and full-of-twists one-button game with metroïdvania level-design where the player can ever only run forward.

PAPER PROTOTYPES & BOARDGAMES

A Pokémon Adventure

While spending time with a 6-year old, I designed a roguelike using the Pokemon Trading-Card-Game - meant to teach him how to play, while being immersed in a story in which he is the hero, battling Team Rocket.

Adventure Lite

An innovative game inspired by Darkest Dungeon, mixing narrative events with a marriage of cooperative and competitive mechanics - featuring a special gameplay language to automate enemy actions.

EXISTING-GAMES REDESIGNS

BG3: Malkir, the Bard from Sigil.

In-depth document + interactive dialog prototype about adding a new companion to Baldur's Gate 3: A plane-traveling bard who beds demons and sings with a cutting accent, plus ideas to improve the story even more.

BG3 (Early Access) UX Redesign

Mockups made during the Early Access version of Baldur's Gate 3 to improve the navigation of menus, especially of the quest journal and map. Met with a lot of enthusiasm on Reddit.

DOS2 Quest Concept

Using the Larian Design Test to imagine a quest using the Divinity Original Sin 2 Engine.

CONCEPT DOCUMENTS

The Witch of Xangdebaar

An expansive vision of an Epic Space Opera story in the mood of Harry Potter meets Tantra, or Matrix meets the 5th Element. It was reimagined many times as the beginning of a AAA game, Indie project, and a novel.

Yanshu

A universe Bible for a grim political world in which magi derive their powers from Salt and imprison the souls of demons in technological devices; set in an equivalent of the second industrial revolution.

Dune AAA

Imagining the best-selling first novel of the series Dune as an immersive RPG inspired by the Hitman series. Innovative social infiltration and a rhythm-based approach to combat are the stars of this project.

About me

My unique experience: Having to stop my studies in game design premateurely due to illness, I decided to become a nomad and find solutions to what was troubling me. Ever since, I've had a foot in 2 different worlds: digital storytelling and modern esoterica (which I'll use to encompass shamanism and its branch of personal development, physical and mental therapy, especially targeting sexual and emotional issues).

I spent a few years being a nomad, in-between gaming projects learning alongside experts in the field of tantra, emotional development, bodywork and sexual health - and I never let go of the dream of bringing all of that unusual baggage into the world of games. I had the opportunity at one point to make use of both expertise while I was working at Lua: a dating app for the conscious community, where I brought my skills in UX and gamification.

I’ve naturally been drawn toward story-reach mature RPGs, fantasy, the weird, the crazyly fascinating, and the empowering. Most recently, I've been diving deep into topics of modern alternatives for governance and the crises in ecology, democracy, emotional and mental health, and technology.

Some subjects dear to my heart: There’s no denying today that both the real world and the gaming indistry are in crisis, and the two have same problem.

Times and again, players have demonstrated that they yearn for games which treat them like smart adults with a vocation to explore deep and mature themes: The success of games like Baldur's Gate 3, Death Stranding, Disco Elysium, Clair/Obscur: Expedition 33 and others in recent years has all but proven there is a deep desire in gamers to engage with and support passion-first innovative and mature projects.

The perfect recipe for a game is: Passion, Expertise, Innovation, and Love.

Why I make games: The stories we tell each other define us; they frame our past, inform our present, and serve as a stepping stone to imagine our future.

There is a need today for our stories to break out of the mold of the past 40 years, as Alan Moore as himself said: “infantalizing, unhealthy escapism in need of growing up”.

The new crises we face on Earth require new stories, new imagination - our storytellers have to find inspiration not in the stories which have been made before, but in real life experiences, in the imagination of future-oriented experts, in the love that unite us all deep down.

I wish to use my talents to craft the next generations of stories, ones which empower people to become united as one sovereign humanity, in love, in intelligence and in courage.