Portfolio · Game Development

Game Development

Elixir of Eternity

Team lead & main programmer

GodotSince 20252D isometric

A gathering and crafting game. You play Alma, a young alchemist: gather in the outskirts, brew potions, sell them in the city, and follow the trail her sister left toward the elixir.

Built

I lead the project across design, visuals, and programming: scope, schedule, and the direction the team works to.
I am the main programmer on the loop that ties it together: gathering, crafting, the potions that change how the outskirts play, and the economy that sells them.
I author the shaders and tech art that give the isometric world its handmade look.
I set and hold the visual direction so the work of several people reads as one world.

How

I build it in Godot, writing the rendering work directly in its shading language rather than assembling it from stock nodes.
I document decisions so a small, part-time team can move without me in the room.

It is in active development. I will publish a full technical write-up of the rendering and systems once the current build settles.

Research

Game design is the part of the craft I can defend in writing: my level design paper is peer-reviewed and published at FDG, and my bachelor thesis attacks the same problem from the design side.

Creating Memorable Player Experiences Through Level Design: A Case Study of Elden Ring's Siofra River Well Elevator Scene

Ismail Adiyaman, Chrysa Bika, Daniel Dyrda · FDG '26: Foundations of Digital Games, Copenhagen · 2026 · DOI 10.1145/3815598.3815691

Player experience is shaped through the direct and indirect choices of game developers. Many people who have played a game have some memorable gaming moments that they still vividly remember long after forgetting other parts of the game. This paper examines the Siofra River Well scene in Elden Ring through a lens of psychology and level design to understand how level design can be used to manipulate player psychology in order to achieve memorability.

Read it in the ACM Digital Library

A framework for deriving design patterns from intended player experiences

Ismail Adiyaman · Bachelor thesis, TUM

A framework for deriving game design patterns from the experiences a designer intends to create, built on the Design, Dynamics, Experience (DDE) model. Rather than cataloguing patterns observed in existing games, the approach works backwards from a target player experience to the structures that produce it.

My degree

BSc Informatik: Games Engineering, Technical University of Munich

I studied Games Engineering at TUM, a computer science degree with a games core. It has the CS curriculum in full, plus game technology, game design, and the formal analysis of play. It is the shared foundation under both this page and my Computer Science page; what differs is which half does the talking.

Formally studied

Game design patterns (DDE)
Level design analysis
Player psychology
Game technology & engines

Applied in

Semester game projects
The published level-design research
The thesis framework

Shipped & jammed

These are my jam games and semester projects, each finished inside its deadline. The two at the top earned something external.

GMTK Game Jam 2024

Blue Yellow Green

Top 100 for visuals of 7,500+ entries Godot2024

My jam game, judged on its look by the strictest crowd there is: 7,500 entries, one weekend, and a visual theme to answer.

Play on itch.io

Exhibited at gamescom 2023

Nightmare Slayer

Invited & exhibited at gamescom One week2023

We made this game in a week, and it was invited to and exhibited at gamescom 2023. I drew its poster (see my Art page) and built its visuals.

My first game

Wake Up

Best Visuals UnitySemester Game Jam

A loop of dreams within dreams. I set the visual style, drew the player animations, and guided the other artist to hold the look.

Play on itch.io

University project

Racemarines

UnityUniversity course

A university racing game with submarines. I did the poster art and the visual work.

Shaders & VFX

This is my focused visual work: effects and shaders I took from concept to shipped material.

VFX & environment study

Cannon Blast

UnityShader Graph2025

I took a cannon blast from concept sketch to shipped effect, plus the ocean shader and golden-hour sky the prototype sits on. I drew it first, then built it in Shader Graph so teammates who do not read shader code can still edit it.

Where most of my shader & VFX work lives

Together at Last

ShadersVFX2024

The ongoing home of my shader and effects work.

Skills

Shipped with

Godot
Unity
C#
GDScript
HLSL / ShaderLab
Shader Graph
Real-time VFX
Lighting

Comfortable in

Team lead & project management
Game feel & readability
Level design
Design documentation
Playtest iteration
Blender
Git workflows

Learning

Unreal: materials, Niagara, the C++ side

I don't have any shipped Unreal work yet. The rendering fundamentals and HLSL I learned at the university carry over directly to Unreal's materials and VFX, and I am building in it now.