Jonathan Scoffin

Welcome

Hello! Welcome to my games design portfolio. I'm Jonathan Scoffin, a UK games designer with a specialisation in systems and technical design.I'm studying Gameplay Design and Production at the University of Staffordshire, and I'm seeking to apply the skills I've learnt and developed throughout my education to bridge the gap between creative visions and technical implementations in games development.

Below you can see some of my projects and awards, or click the links above to see my design documentation or learn more about me!

Awards & Nominations

Projects

• Featured (3)
• All (10)
• Party (3)
• Puzzle (3)
• Game Jams (3)
• Solo (3)

About

Hi! I'm Jonathan, a third year Games Design and Production student at Staffordshire University!I'm incredibly passionate about building experiences for players, combining creativity with technical skills to produce engaging and unique games. Throughout my journey making games, I've sought to acquire a diverse range of skills, which have helped me understand the different aspects of games development. I'm always looking to challenge myself and learn new things!

I've been coding from a young age, and I've always been interested in using those skills to make games. Naturally, I was very happy to find my local college had a games design course I could enrol in. There, I developed my technical skills and learnt design theory, skills which I built on while attending the University of Staffordshire.

Awards & Nominations

Interests

I really enjoy music, and I've been playing the drums since I was 11. I'm really passionate about playing the drums, and I love playing music with tricky time signatures and rhythms!I also really enjoy playing video games, of course! Some of my favourites include Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Grim Fandango!

I love F1, and have had a great time seeing the Grand Prix at Silverstone!Some of my favourite racing games include Trackmania, Forza Horizon, and the F1 series!

At University I'm very interested in getting involved with clubs and societies. I'm currently a committee member for the Games Development Society, where I've helped organise multiple game jams and student events throughout the year.

Contact

Feel free to contact me through my email: [email protected], or add me on LinkedIn!

Projects

• Runes & Rites

Take upgrades to become the most powerful mage in this 2 to 4 player party game!

Year	2026
Engine	Unreal 5
Roles	Production, Design

• Little Castles

Build a castle and battle your friends in this pvp tower defence game!

Year	2026
Engine	Unreal 5
Roles	Solo Developer

• Crabsticks

Compete to be the top crab in this unique 2 to 4 player physics-based party game!

Year	2025
Engine	Unreal 5
Roles	Production, Design

• Pushy Plushy

Ruin your friendships in this cute and chaotic 2 to 4 player party game!

Year	2025
Engine	Unreal 5
Roles	Production, Design

• Polybeat

Master complicated polyrhythms in this drumming rhythm game!

Year	2025
Engine	Unity 6
Roles	Solo Developer

• Echoes of Emptiness

Work together to navigate a derelict space station in this 2-player experimental co-op horror game.

Year	2025
Engine	Unreal 5
Roles	Design, Development, Production

Old Projects

These older projects are less indicative of my skill today, but you can still check them out here!

• Esoterra

Build a colony on mars and survive the harsh conditions!

Year	2025
Engine	Unity 6
Roles	Design, Programming

• Unqualified

Lie on your CV and struggle to complete several jobs that you are certainly unqualified for!

Year	2024
Engine	Unity 2023
Roles	Design, Programming

• Wildcard

A small top-down roguelike shooter, where you acquire upgrade cards to increase your power!

Year	2023
Engine	Unity 2022
Roles	Design, Programming, Art

• Bloodlust Limited

An arcade hack n' slash roguelite set in hell! Collect blood, upgrade your abilities, and gather as many souls as you can for Bloodlust Ltd.

Year	2023
Engine	Unity 2022
Roles	Design, Programming, Modelling

• Deep Space Ace

Blast enemy ships out of the sky in this fast-paced spaceship dogfighting game!

Year	2022
Engine	Unity 2022
Roles	Design, Programming, Modelling

• Deep Sea Scuttle

Become a pirate and race your friends to treasure island in this YGD Bafta nominated 2-4 player party game!

Year	2021
Engine	Unity 2019
Roles	Design, Programming, Modelling

Game Jams

• Conformity Cubed

Shift blocks into place in this mind-bending 3D puzzle game that won the 2026 UKIE Student Game Jam!

Year	2026
Engine	Unity 6
Roles	Design, Programming

• Murder at the Ball

Catch a masked killer and solve a string of murders in this detective puzzle game!

Year	2026
Engine	Unity 6
Roles	Design, Programming

• Scryer's Shadow

Jump between shadows and avoid the light in this abstract platformer that won the 2025 UKIE Student Game Jam!

Year	2025
Engine	Unity 6
Roles	Art, Design, Programming

Documentation

• Runes & Rites GDD

Here I've complied some of the design documentation I made for a large student project creating a 2-4 player party game during my third year at university.

• Tiny Shaders GDD

I created this game design document during my third year at university for my final year project, Tiny Shaders.

• Little Castles TDD

I created this technical design document during my third year at university for a solo project called Little Castles.

• Pushy Plushy GDD

I created the template for this GDD and worked on it alongside 5 other designers during my second year at university, for a 2 to 4 player party game.

• Polybeat Design Document

I created this design document during my third year at university, for a solo project called Polybeat.

• Lancer Design Document

I created this design document during my second year at university, for a level I made using an existing framework called Lancer.

Runes & Rites was a 27-person project I participated in over the course of 8 weeks in my third year of university. It's a 2-4 player party game where you fight your friends and take upgrades between rounds to become the strongest wizard!On the project I worked both as a designer and producer. My responsibilities as a producer included:

My main contributions as a designer included:

I also made SFX and produced the music for the game!

• Combat and Upgrades

In my role as a designer, I was responsible for designing and iterating upon the game's core feature - the upgrade system - alongside the combat mechanics.Two of our core pillars were creativity and approachability, and ensuring the upgrade and combat systems were both approachable for new players whilst allowing experienced players to make unique and creative builds was an engaging design challenge.To achieve those core pillars, I designed the combat system around simple behaviours that could be modified in diverse ways to create engaging builds. Furthermore, I designed the upgrade system to focus around 5 core numeric stats (damage, health, etc.), while including several exciting and unique modifications to the player's abilities (such as lifesteal, ricochet, or explosive attacks), allowing for a player's build to easily be comprehended from the core stats while still including exciting upgrades!

My design documentation for the combat mechanics

• UI

In this project, I was responsible for designing and implementing the game's UI in-engine.

For the UI, a core focus was communicating the information in a clear yet unique manner, but in a way that also fit with the game's theme and setting. This led to using a pile of stacked tokens to display players' scores, for which I built a small 1D physics solver; or using a spider graph in the form of a magical glowing pentagram to communicate the player's 5 core stats, for which I built a custom UI material using SDFs.

When building the main menu, I decided to go for a design that existed within the game-space, allowing the players to become familiar with the controls and combat mechanics in a safe area. This worked to ensure the first-time player experience naturally tutorialised new players, fulfilling our design pillar of approachability.

• Gamemodes

I also designed and implemented our 6 gamemodes, ranging from deathmatch to capture the spirits, building unique objective mechanics alongside core functionalities to handle game state and scoring. A key focus of the gamemode design was creating gamemodes that were meaningfully distinct from one another, while not completely reframing the game's upgrade system, and remaining easy to communicate to players. This constraint was challenging to work around, and you can see a few rejected ideas in the documentation.

Overall, this project was an amazing experience designing and building technically complex systems, and working around tricky design constraints to build a game that's easy to pick up, but has a good deal to offer when you get into it!You can play the game on Itch here and read the design documentation I created here.Runes & Rites was voted #2 out of 37 other games in the CGD26 Student's Choice award, and was nominated for Best Audio, Best Art, Best Game, and Best Promotional Materials!

Little Castles was an 8-week long project I did in my third year of university, as part of the technical prototyping module.In this project, I really wanted to challenge myself in implementing difficult technical features. This included:

the primary challenge was implementing the hexagonal grid. Taking the time to plan out my classes before implementation allowed me to build the systems cleanly and modularly.

Dynamic mesh generation was another key challenge. I opted to build my terrain meshes at runtime by procedurally generating mesh data in-engine, allowing the terrain pieces to smoothly blend into each other. Keeping clear documentation for myself was key in staying organised, and aided me massively in building my triangulation tables.

I also built tools for myself using Unreal's editor utility widgets feature, which made building the levels much easier as I could quickly perform helpful actions such as snapping objects to the hexagonal grid, or mirroring the level about a point.

Most of these features were implemented using Unreal's blueprints, though I utilised C++ to implement multithreading for some of the more costly algorithms. Performance and optimisation was a key focus, and I went through several rounds of optimisations using Unreal's profiling tools to ensure efficiency.This was a great experience to challenge myself technically and learn key optimisation skills, both in Unreal engine specifically and with games development generally.You can read the TDD for the project here.

Tiny Shaders was a 16-week long project I did in my third year of university for my Final Year Project (FYP).As a big fan of the Zachtronic games and other "Zach-Likes", I chose this project for my FYP as an opportunity to explore what makes this open-ended (sometimes called design-based) puzzle genre tick. To make Tiny Shaders an engaging open-ended puzzle game, my core pillars included:

Designing the core game rules to achieve the design goals stated above took multiple rounds of iteration, moving from having several different data types (floats, ints, vectors, textures), to just 2 (ints and textures), eventually to just 1 (ints), as well as changing what operations will be available (removing the focus on matrices and other complex mathematical operations towards simpler building blocks).Once this process was complete, I validated my design with an incredibly simple prototype. I designed the shape of my blocks, came up with some puzzles, and drew up potential solutions. In doing so, I was effectively playtesting the game by challenging myself to build a solution to these problems.

Completing these puzzles validated that this core experience was enjoyable, and helped me significantly in understanding the types of problems I wanted to challenge players with. These problems involved utilising and combining the components in unique ways by discovering different ideas or reframing their perception of the game mechanics.After having built the core functionality in-engine, the focus shifted to tutorialisation and balancing, for which I organised several playtesting sessions. After each session, I was able to refine the onboarding and tutorialisation process and tweak the difficulty curve. One key improvement I made was breaking up puzzles such that players can gradually learn new ideas. Where I had puzzles require the player discover several new ideas at once to solve it, I broke these up into multiple puzzles that required the player to slowly build upon their knowledge from the previous puzzle, creating a satisfying and rewarding sense of progression in the player.This was a great experience for me in developing a game in a new and challenging genre, and I'm very pleased with the result.Tiny Shaders won 1st place at the university's 2026 Graduate Exhibition, in the Games Prototypes category. You can read the GDD for the project here, and download the game from itch here.

Crabsticks was an 8-week long project I participated in as part of the University of Staffordshire's 1up programme - a highly coveted paid summer internship developing games alongside top students and lecturers in an industry setting. It's a 2-4 player physics-based party game, where you compete against your friends across a large variety of ball games!In this project, my primary role was as a technical designer, where I:

I also worked as a producer, organising tasks and communicating between disciplines.

Some of the documentation I produced for the gamemodes I designed and implemented

A comparison between my initial level concept and the final implemented version, showcasing the iteration involved in one of the levels I designed.

Crabsticks was an excellent opportunity to learn under expert guidance and leadership from the university lecturers, and to explore creative ideas in this unique game concept. I really valued the time I had on the project, and it really helped to develop both my practical design skills, as well as soft teamwork and collaborative skills, learning from both my peers and leaders.Crabsticks was nominated for 3 TIGA awards in the categories of Social Game, Casual Game, and Creativity in Games!

Pushy Plushy was a 26-person project I led as producer over the course of 8 weeks in my second year of university. It's a 2-4 player party game revolving around a series of minigames with wacky modifiers that pit you and your friends against one-another!In this project I worked as the team's producer, where I had to organise a team spanning several different disciplines, manage deadlines, and resolve disputes.I also worked as a designer, concepting and implementing mechanics and minigames, as well as helping to organise and maintaining the game design document. You can read the full GDD here.

Some of the documentation I produced for the GDD

My design work involved work in-engine, creating high-level systems such as the grapple grab minigame, organising low-level systems to allow others to work efficiently, and resolving bugs throughout.

Flowchart for the functionality of the grapple hook item, the central mechanic of the grapple grab minigame I built.

Additionally, I wrote the music for the game, which you can listen to here!This project has been a brilliant opportunity to get experience with organising and leading a large team, creating supporting documentation, and managing and delivering on goals. Pushy Plushy was nominated for TIGA's Best Student Game 2025.

Polybeat was a solo project I completed in my second year of university, for the Arcade Games Development module. It's an arcade rhythm game that tries to teach real drumming skills through challenging the player to learn and master tricky time signatures and strange polymetres. The game is themed around the band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and utilises songs from their Polygondwanaland album, which was released under an open license, free for fans to use.While the game accepts keyboard inputs, I was very interested in connecting a real electronic drumkit to the game. This proved incredibly engaging for players, though presented interesting technical and design challenges. getting UI navigation with a drumkit feeling natural was something that required extensive iteration and user testing.

The drumkit and bindings for menu navigation.

Working on this project was a real joy, as I greatly enjoy both drumming and KGLW's songs. A core focus of this project was teaching new players drumming skills. I implemented 5 different difficulty settings and went through several different balance passes with playtesters at a variety of drumming skill levels, tweaking the difficulty to ensure that all players can participate, enjoy, and learn drumming skills in the game.A focus of the arcade module was ensuring the experience would function as an arcade machine. For this, I implemented an attract screen, leaderboard system, and arcade mode. I also placed a significant focus on the user experience and customisation options. I included control rebindings, volume controls, input delay customisation, a low flashes mode, and a setting to display the songs in proper drumming notation. Game feel was also a design focus, and I put effort into ensuring hitting each note felt impactful.Programming a rhythm game led to a series of technical issues I had to overcome. Some areas of game logic were programmed to run on Unity's audio thread, ensuring the note detection stayed in-sync with the music. Additionally, creating charts by manually defining the position of each note in a table would be an incredibly tedious way to create levels, so I developed a pipeline for me to be able to create midi files in a DAW and export them into Unity, having the notes be read and converted into level data. This sped up the development of new levels significantly.You can download the game from itch here, and read the GDD here.

Echoes of Emptiness was a two-person project I did in my second year of university. It's an asymmetrical 2-player co-op horror game, where the copilot player must guide the pilot player through a level and help them avoid the dangers that lurk in the darkness.With this project, I wanted to achieve an immersive horror experience by bringing game elements out of the screen for the player to physically interact with, including a custom controller, walkie-talkie, and a physical mission briefing document. these physical items deliver an immersive and novel way of interacting with the game, increasing player immersion.My responsibility in this project was designing and implementing the mechanics of the game, while my teammate focused on creating supporting documents and adding sounds. A significant technical challenge was setting up the game to work with multiplayer networking, using Unreal's replication systems. Having completed this project, I feel confident in my ability to use networking in future projects.You can download the game from itch here, and read the GDD and supporting documents here.

Wildcard was a 3-person project that I led for my final major project (FMP) in my second year in college.The gameplay revolves around progressing through a series of encounters, dodging bullets and eliminating enemies, and upgrading your weapon as you progress.A focus of this project was attempting to revisit and improve the central card upgrades mechanic of my previous project, Bloodlust Ltd. Wildcard, albeit less visually impressive, has far better balancing in the difficulty levelling and upgrades mechanics than Bloodlust Ltd. In Wildcard, I removed the limit on how many upgrades can be equipped, and introduced the mechanic of improving existing upgrades. I also aimed to explicitly tailor the upgrades towards certain builds, such as making a sniper rifle, a cannon, or a shotgun. Additionally, the code I wrote was a lot more easily extendable, allowing me to implement more upgrades.Another focus was on improving game-feel. I accomplished this with the use of screen-shake, time-stop, zooming, flashing, blood splatter, and several particle effects.My responsibilities in this project were designing, coding, and implementing the gameplay mechanics, adding the particle effects, and drawing the blood-splatter and character art.You can download the project from itch here.

Bloodlust Limited

Bloodlust Ltd. was a 3-person project I led in my second year of college. It is a hack n' slash roguelite set in hell, where the player can purchase upgrades by collecting and spending the blood of their enemies.A core focus of this project was researching the history of the roguelite genre, and implementing similar arcade mechanics. The enemies spawned and layouts of each floor are procedurally generated, and the game is effectively endless.My responsibility in this project was designing, coding, and implementing the gameplay mechanics, as well as modelling the environment and enemies. My teammates were responsible for modelling the character (which ultimately did not get finished in time), and weapons.You can download the project from itch here.

Deep Space Ace

Deep Space Ace was a 3-person project I led in my second year of college. It is a space dogfighting game, putting you in the cockpit of a small sci-fi fighter in a 25 vs 25 skirmish.One focus of this project was accessibility and tutorialisation. I've included a number of options in the settings menu, including adjusting brightness and contrast, changing the difficulty, swapping the UI colours, inverting controls, and adjusting the mouse sensitivity. I've also added popup hints that naturally introduce the control scheme to the player.Another focus was the AI, which I designed and created myself using several weights to avoid other nearby ships.My responsibility in this project was designing, coding, and implementing the gameplay mechanics, as well as creating the ship model. My teammates created some other 3D models that didn't make it into the game in the end.You can download the project from itch here.

Deep Sea Scuttle was four-person project I led in my first year of college. It is a 2-4 player local multiplayer party game, where players are racing against each other to reach treasure island. It is the first game I've ever made!A core focus of this project was taking the frantic nature of party games such as Unrailed or Overcooked and applying it to a versus multiplayer format. The player is constantly split between several tasks, including steering their ship to avoid rocks, loading and firing the cannon, adjusting the sails to catch the wind, and repairing any holes left in your boat by your opponent.My responsibility in this project was design, programming, and modelling, with my teammates implementing sound effects, particle effects, and the UI. I also wrote the music!This game was nominated for the 2022 Young Game Developer's Bafta award. You can download the game from the Xbox store or on itch!

Conformity Cubed was a 4-person project which we made in 32 hours for the 2026 UKIE Student Game Jam. The theme was "reflection".In Conformity Cubed, the player must solve puzzles by moving 2 cubes around a 3D grid into specific locations. The difficulty lies in the player always moving both cubes at the same time, and only being able to move either cube in a certain direction if the other cube can also move in that direction.Following my success last year in winning the jam, I knew that a simple yet expandable core concept was critical for success. Ensuring we could deliver a highly polished and complete experience was a key focus for myself and the team heading into the jam. We were able to include 12 levels, 5 unique level mechanics, and a cohesive experience with smooth level transitions, SFX, VFX, and clean stylised visuals. This was a huge success for myself and my teammates in our ability to scope features, plan, and rapidly develop the game, and has been an incredible experience for me to develop my skills rapidly implementing and iterating on ideas, and working efficiently in a team under a tight time restriction.

Snapshots of my debug testing world at various stages throughout the jam

My responsibilities in this project included programming the gameplay systems, designing 4 of the 12 levels, and collaboratively designing the core gameplay. My teammates focused on 3D art, non-gameplay programming, and gameplay and level design.A significant challenge for me was quickly implementing the mechanics. Ensuring the player can move consistently around 3D surfaces, handling various rotations and strange level geometries was a really engaging task, and it took me about 5 hours to get the movement and other gameplay mechanics working. It was thanks to this rapid implementation that I was able to have so much time to dedicate towards creating new features and adding in loads of polish, ensuring the game felt good to play.Conformity Cubed won in the overall winner category in the jam. You can download the game from itch here.

Murder at the Ball was a 9-person project for the 2026 Global Game Jam, which we did in 48 hours. The theme was "mask".In Murder at the Ball, the player is given a series of names, and a series of masked party-goers, one of which is the killer! The player must use the clues given to them to match the names to the masked identities and reveal the killer's name!My responsibilities in this project were gameplay programming and design. Over the 48 hours, I created the game concept, drew up a pen-and-paper prototype, and programmed the gameplay. Due to the large size of the team, I also created some rough design documentation, which helped keep the team organised. My teammate's responsibilities included 3D art, animation, programming, UI design, and audio.One of the biggest technical challenges in the game is the puzzle generation. Due to it being an endless game, each puzzle is randomly generated by creating and assigning a series of clues to each character. Creating the script that generates each of the puzzles, ensures they are solvable (but not trivial), and ensures that the killer is the hardest identity to solve was a difficult challenge in technical design, but ultimately led to the puzzles being enjoyable and satisfying.

The first puzzle my algorithm generated, at the time just pasted into the console as text. See if you can find the killer's name!

This was a great experience for me to work efficiently in a larger team, prototype and iterate rapidly on a design, and overcome unique technical design challenges!Murder at the Ball was awarded Best Art and Overall Winner of the jam site we participated in (University of Staffordshire). You can download the game from itch here

A quick doodled UI wireframe I made at the start of the jam. Documentation doesn't have to be pretty when on the clock!

Scryer's Shadow was a 2-person project which we did in 32 hours for the 2025 UKIE Student Game Jam. The theme was "contrast".In Scryer's Shadow, the player must hop between shadows and avoid the watchful gaze of a mysterious eye, while collecting strange gems to destroy this evil being.A core focus of this project was delivering a highly polished game in a short window. The simple gameplay and concept allowed us to execute the project to a high standard of polish, adding in cutscenes, audio, and several effects in the short amount of time allotted. This project has been a great experience in managing scope and planning.My responsibilities in this project included gameplay design, art, 3D modelling, and programming, while my teammate worked on level design, SFX, and coding the character movement. I also wrote the music!Scryer's Shadow won in the overall winner category in the jam. You can download the game from itch here.

Esoterra

Esoterra was a 2-person project for Global Game Jam 2025, which we did in 48 hours. The theme was "bubble".In Esoterra, the player is tasked with building a Martian colony and fulfilling periodic resource quotas. The player must expand their outpost while adapting to the weather effects, keeping their population fed, and keeping the company happy.A core focus of this project was implementing the relaxing gameplay of Islanders or Sunset Kingdom. This drove the decision to have the resource drops be turn-based instead of time-based, and having the game progress at the player's pace.My responsibility in this project was designing, coding, and implementing the gameplay, while my teammate worked on the UI and modelling.You can download the game from itch here.

Unqualified

Unqualified was a 4-person project for Global Game Jam 2024, which we did in 48 hours. The theme was "make me laugh".The premise is that you've lied on your CV, and now have to complete a bunch of jobs you're unqualified for, all focusing around throwing about a series of physics objects.The idea was to make a Warioware-style series of physics-based minigames. We hoped this combination of an absurd premise, frantic and stressful gameplay, and a silly central mechanic (throwing things about) would lead to a funny gameplay experience.My responsibility in this project was designing, coding, and implementing the gameplay, while my teammates focused on sound effects, UI, and modelling. I also wrote the music!You can download the game from itch here.