Bio

Greg Campbell is a Game Designer residing in Anaheim, California.  His gaming industry projects include Roundhouse, an arcade-style mobile game about kicking things (Victory Point Games – Game Tester); Pawns Unleashed, a promotional tie-in game of riddles to Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma (Petrol Advertising – Lua Engineer); all four Fallout: New Vegas DLCs each of which was a compartmentalized adventure in a darkly humorous post-apocalyptic American setting (Obsidian Entertainment – Focus Tester); and  Dungeon Siege III and its DLC, a combat- and item-focused RPG similar in spirit to Diablo (Obsidian Entertainment – Focus Tester).

Greg has a Master of Science degree in Game Design from Full Sail University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from California State University-Fullerton.  At Full Sail, Greg also gained game production and project management training.  He was part of a team of 8 that, in the span of 4 weeks, created a detailed project management plan (including a budget, change request form, issue log form, team member performance evaluation form, quality assurance checklist, RACI chart, risk register, scope checklist, stakeholder register, and work breakdown structure) for Animal Amy’s Adventure, a tablet platforming game.

Greg has participated in the 2014 and 2015 Global Game Jams where, in each, he was part of a small team that made a game in less than 48 hours.  In 2014, he was a producer on 9 to 5, a humorous office politics simulator.  In 2015, he was a designer for The Patient, a nonviolent game focusing on audio.

Greg enjoys writing blog articles for Gamasutra.  His featured blog articles include Loopy Design Encourages Longer Play Sessions, which can be summarized by, “A dead-end tells the player, ‘Stop!’ but a loop says, ‘Go!'”; and Preferential Treatment Stabilizes Random In-Game Shops, where Greg offers the idea of pre-orders and rarity slots in shops and drops to reduce player frustration due to items and improve game balance.

Greg has broken down the major gameplay elements of Valve’s Portal in his Portal Game Analysis, explaining the whats and whys of element inclusion and placement in levels.

Finally, Greg has worked extensively with StarCraft, having co-authored a turn-based role playing game (Fate and Destiny 2.1) in a real time strategy game.  Fate and Destiny 1.5 won first place in StarEdit.net‘s 2006 RPG contest.