Elijah Chapman

Who I am.

 

My name is Elijah Chapman, but my friends call me a visionary. Well, not explicitly, but most of them would agree with the assessment. I hail from a tiny place in the southwest corner of Virginia called Saltville, and I bet you already know how it got the name. Coming from a place best known for making the world’s most ubiquitous condiment didn’t provide the greatest amount of opportunity to aspiring world-builders, but my will and perseverance were ironclad.

 

I am a game designer. In a lot of respects, it couldn’t have turned out any other way. I spent my entire childhood wrapped up in the worlds and experiences of both traditional and digital media. I thrived on this, and at an early age began experimenting with creating worlds of my own. In the beginning, I worked primarily as an author, with a focus on narrative development, and ways to subtly add detail and realism to the worlds I created. I received praise for my prose, and awards for my work as a playwright. This then developed into a love of performance, which took the dual forms of music and public speech.

 

These experiences allowed me to become a great storyteller, but also to understand how to communicate without words. Applying this expertise to game design, I can craft extraordinary experiences, and compel a player to invest themselves in exploring the worlds I create.

 

This doesn’t require my solitude, however. Throughout my life I have worked in team settings of various sizes and configurations. I have learned to work as a leader, and as a follower. I’ve even become very proficient at creating positive outcomes, and maintaining creative vision in spite of difficult personalities.

 

If you’re looking for a leader, I am that. If you’re looking for a team member, I can be that as well. In either case, you stand to benefit from my knowledge, my experience, my skills, and my vision.

 

How I can help you.

 

I’ve done a great deal of traveling and exploration in my life, in both physical and metaphorical senses, and what this allows me to offer is the ability to create extremely diverse gameplay experiences that are also grounded and informed by my own life.

 

My work as a game designer is based on my desire to push the boundaries of what is possible in interactive digital media. If you’re looking for someone to bang out the five-hundredth Call of Duty clone for the year, you’d best look elsewhere; but if you want to break down industry convention and paradigms, and truly innovate, I’m your guy.

 

Down to the specifics, I’m extremely well experienced with many of the aspects of game development; from core elements like programming, design, and art, to ancillary focuses such as music, community development, and esports.

This allows be to not only effectively communicate between disciplines, which I can do at an extremely high level, it allows me to help build and sustain a unified vision within the studio. If you’ve ever struggled to get your engineers on the same page as your artists, you want to hire me.

 

Outside of these direct contributions, there are indirect ways in which I can benefit you and your studio. I do very efficient and professional quality work at all times. I take a great deal of pride in the work that I do, and I am uncompromising when it comes to quality. This means that you can be certain that what you hire me to do will be done ahead of schedule, within budget, at an excellent level.

 

What I do.

 

I’ve worn a lot of hats as a game designer, which means that my list of qualifying skills and experiences is getting perilously long. To cut it down to something more digestible, the simple answer is that I take ideas, build worlds out of them, and then I take those worlds and craft experiences for players. Along the way this requires an innumerable amount of steps, and constant feedback and iteration between myself and the rest of the development team.

 

How this works can change drastically from project to project, dependent on the needs and capabilities of the team and the scope of the project, but my general best practices include doing extensive technical and creative documentation at every step of the process which enables the rest of the studio to maintain a consistent vision across all disciplines. Once documentation is at the workable stage, because these documents are never “finished” so to speak, I shift focus to doing specific production, or creative direction, on the project.

 

If I’m working production, I can do anything from level design, to mechanics, balance, systems integration, or any of a long list of other jobs that are required to get the game done. If I’m in a leadership role, I’m likely to still get my hands dirty and involve myself with production anyway, but I will always put the health of the team, the vision of the project, and the goals of the studio first in mind.

 

There is very little throughout the entire game creation process that I have not done, and nothing at all that I cannot do.

To condense it down to a point: I am a one man army of game creation.

 

My projects.

 

I’ve done extensive work in the Source engine, creating mods, levels, doing scripting, and other miscellaneous work. I have also had a great deal of experience working in both the Unity and Unreal environments.

While a majority of my previous work directly relates to level design, gameplay design, and other core aspects, in the last six months I have been working on an independent project in the Unity engine, which has taken the form of a traditional 2D side-scrolling platformer.

 

Outside of this I have tons of experience designing both analog and digital games, primarily doing the design and development of the technical and creative documentation on these titles, but I have also done the remaining production work on several of these.

 

Working with me.

 

I bring energy to the teams I work with. I inspire people around me to work to their highest capacity by living that example myself. My tendency is to engage in lively discussions, and I’ll always offer scrutiny to new ideas, meaning that potential pitfalls and challenges will be found very early on in the development process. Despite all of this, and my serious commitment to the quality of the product, I remain approachable and willing to engage with my team on whatever level is required. Team morale, building relationships, and learning how best to work together are all essential parts to creating high-quality games.