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Having more than 10 years of experience as a Game Designer for various studios, and a bachelor's degree in Graphic Design, my expertise is diverse.

I have always been a hardcore gamer since I was a kid. I've played role-playing games and video games my whole life. I also often modified game rules, used house rules and created my own games as side projects.


         "Creating games is my greatest goal
           and I'm a real passionate about it!"

PRE-VIDEOGAME INDUSTRY

I have a Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design and worked in a gaming store for 4 years during which, I played a lot of the games the store held various gaming events in the miniature wargames (MWG) and collectible card games (CCG) domains. During the time I worked there, I was perceived as a living encyclopedia for various game systems.

BASTION STUDIO

At one point, I was hired and trained to be a Game Designer for a project called Ex illis, a tabletop miniature wargame in which the gameplay was entirely handled by a software. It allowed the game to strongly focus on the "easy to learn, but hard to master" philosophy.

Working on Ex illis for almost 3 years was an incredible experience for me. My Game Design mentor was the founder and Creative Director of Bastion Studio, but he also worked as a Game Designer on Assasin's Creed and Splinter Cell series at Ubisoft in the past.

SARBAKAN GAME STUDIO

I then stepped in the videogame industry and was hired by Sarbakan Game Studio as a Quality Assurance technician. I got promoted to the Game Design department after 8 months.

3 Months later, the company was sold to Adrenaline Amusements and I was caught in a massive layoff in which more than half of the company was cut. However, working at Sarbakan had been a great opportunity during which I had learned a lot.

NINE DOTS STUDIO

Soon after that, I met with the founder of Nine Dots Studio, Guillaume Boucher Vidal at the IGDA's Portfolio evaluation event where he interviewed me and then decided to hire me!

I worked for Nine Dots for about a year and a half on aproject titled GoD Factory: Wingmen, a "PvP space dogfight MOBA". I helped design the factions' special abilities, balance a considerable amount of different spaceships, all of their individual ship parts which were all fragments of a pretty hardcore gameplay experience. I worked very closely with the game's creator to remain as faithful to his vision as possible.

It was an incredible experience with a hard working and very talented team of people!

SARBAKAN / ADRENALINE AMUSEMENT

After GoD Factory: Wingmen was done, including a free expansion, I went back to work for Sarbakan.

After becoming a subsidiary of Adrenaline Amusement, Sarbakan realigned their focus on the (very much alive) Arcade Market and they had huge success stories since they did!

This whole new reality has given us new challenges, such as pleasing a very different crowd of people than what we were used to, with a different scope for our games :

• Very short & intense gameplay (1-2 minutes games)
• "Ticket Redemption" systems
• Balancing according to players' performance
• And more

My LinkedIn profile:
www.linkedin.com/in/rock-mercier-b7216a6a