About me

Hello there!

I am Arie Gijsenbergh, a 27 year old Game & Level Designer from the Netherlands.

Currently I am working as a Level Designer at Starbreeze Studios in Stockholm where I design new levels for OVERKILL's The Walking Dead.

Previously I worked in Berlin at Bigpoint where I designed levels for Drakensang: Online.
Level design was always a big hobby of mine, ever since I was a teenager, I started creating levels for Counter-Strike 1.6 and later I joined more modding communities to create levels for a several different games.

I decided to explore the field of game development even more and I taught myself to program and joined a Software Engineering course. During this time I learned a lot of technical skills but as much as I enjoyed programming, I was missing the Design aspects of it.

At this time I started to participate in Game jams and decided to completely focus on Game Design rather than Programming. I went to the NHTV University of Applied Sciences to study 'Design & Production' as part of their 'International Game Architecture & Design' course (BEng).

During these years I managed several teams (up to teams of 13 people), and I learned how important good communication and planning is. My programming background also helped me to understand technical difficulties and allowed to easily scope down projects when necessary.

In these projects I have seen many different aspect of Game Development but Level Design is still the most inspiring to me. I just love to see an environment come to life. Every little piece of geometry can have a huge impact on gameplay. As a designer you have the power to guide players to certain locations and can create complex interactive systems from scratch.
In the end I want players to enjoy playing my levels as much as I had creating them.
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