I am a game designer with experience across casual genres, puzzle games, indie projects, Unity and UE4, focused these days on AI-driven prototyping, LiveOps, team organisation and metrics-based product improvement. At Bini Games I have worked on a run of kids' titles, including Rainbow High Colouring, which entered the Top 50 new successful kids' games and reached hundreds of thousands of downloads across Android and iOS with a strong focus on organic traffic. As Head of Game Designers at GrandMA Studios I managed a team of five designers and rebuilt the production pipeline from scratch, improving on-time milestone delivery from under 10% to roughly 99%. I work prototype-first: the GDD is built around a validated prototype, which is what makes documentation practical and production-ready rather than aspirational.
A zombie-apocalypse base builder wrapped around a match-3, a 3D bridge-building puzzle runner, and a cognitive-training companion for older players. Each was assembled quickly with AI assistance, then tuned by hand until the loop actually held up.
A zombie-apocalypse base builder wrapped around a match-3 mini-game, where the matched pallets are the ammunition and supply that keep your camp alive. Panda soldiers hold the line, a squad of cheerfully awful sergeants narrate it, and the two layers are tuned so that a good match-3 run is immediately visible on the base screen. Fully playable in the browser with a Ukrainian and English interface.
PLAY Opens in your browser
A jelly character eats coloured blocks, swells up, and spits them back out to build bridges across gaps - then walks up the vertical surfaces it has just created. Stepping on someone else's stair costs a block to repaint, which turns a simple collect-and-place loop into a small resource decision on every gap. Multiplier gates, a level map, a shop and a daily gift are all wired in, so the prototype demonstrates the meta layer and not just the core mechanic.
PLAY Opens in your browser
Casual cognitive games and a memory companion aimed at older players, built around the observation that memory and fine motor skill fade like a garden left untended. The onboarding asks who the app is for - yourself, a parent, a grandparent - and shapes the questions and the daily plan accordingly. It is explicitly not a medical product, and the interface is deliberately quiet: short, bounded sessions, generous type, and no attempt to keep anyone in the app longer than the exercise needs.
PLAY Opens in your browserMost design documents are written before anyone knows whether the thing is fun, which is why so many of them are quietly abandoned two sprints in. I work the other way round: build the smallest playable version first — these days with Claude and AI-generated art, which compresses that step from weeks to days — and only then write the GDD, describing the build the team can already open. The document becomes a record of decisions that survived contact with a real player, and production stops arguing about hypotheticals.
A colouring game that found its audience organically, a kids' pet sim, and a hidden-object adventure for the PC casual market. The other nine are one click away.
Built 0 → 1
The title I am proudest of, and the one I owned end to end: concept, core loop, progression, monetisation and the GDD that the team built from. It landed in the Top 50 new kids' releases and pulled hundreds of thousands of downloads across iOS and Android almost entirely on organic traffic. With no meaningful UA budget behind it, the store page and the first ninety seconds of play had to do the marketing themselves, so most of my design effort went into making the very first colouring session feel generous and instantly readable to a child who cannot yet read.
Built 0 → 1
A kitten daycare built from an empty document. Children feed, bathe, treat and tuck in a room full of restless cats, and every one of those verbs had to survive the hardest usability audience there is: a four-year-old with no reading ability and no patience for a tutorial. The design work was mostly subtraction - cutting states, widening hit areas, and letting animation carry the instructions that text normally would.
Built 0 → 1
A hidden-object puzzle adventure built from idea to release: a stolen Egyptian artefact, a rising tide of missing-person cases, and a great many stray cats. The craft in a HOPA is almost entirely in pacing - a scene has to alternate between search, puzzle and story beat often enough that the player never notices they have been clicking on the same screen for four minutes.
Mobile casual puzzle and brain-teaser games, with the emphasis on how fast an idea can be made playable. I build a web prototype with Claude, generate and integrate the art with AI tooling, then write the GDD around the thing that already runs - documentation that describes a validated build rather than a hopeful one.
Hypercasual and educational games for children, with live operations as the main focus. The work runs in a loop: read the current product's metrics, form a hypothesis about what is actually limiting them, write the GDD for the feature that tests it, ship, and measure. Alongside that I have taken several products from the first idea all the way to release.
I managed a team of five game designers while running my own project. The production pipeline was rebuilt from scratch during my time there, and on-time milestone delivery moved from under 10% to roughly 99% - not through pressure, but by making workload visible and by fixing the handoffs between departments that were quietly eating the schedule.
A walking simulator on UE4 about the difficulty Ukrainian soldiers face adapting to life in the rear. I wrote documentation and gave feedback at every stage; as a former serviceman I also reviewed the script and level design for anything that did not ring true. A social project rather than a commercial one, supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.
National Pedagogical Dragomanov University · 2018
National Pedagogical Dragomanov University · 2016
A teaching background is unusually useful when your players are four years old, and public administration turned out to be exactly the training a Head of Game Design needs when the real problem is not the design at all but the schedule around it. Languages: Ukrainian and Russian as native, English at B2. There is a life outside all of this too — it has its own page.
A role, a project, a question about something on this site — all welcome. Write below and it lands straight in my inbox.
