HARRISON BOLINSeattle/PST
Howdy! My name is Harrison and I’m a game designer with 4 years of professional industry experience.
I’ve worked on titles including Forza Motorsport (2023), Forza Horizon 5, and multiple mobile games.
With my experience in economy, level, systems, and narrative design I can quickly adapt to your team’s design needs. Making incredible games that delight players is my goal, and I am currently open for work!
Email
LinkedIn
Bluesky
Skills:
- Level Design
- System Design
- Economy Design
- Narrative Design
- Unity Engine
- Lua
-
C++ / C#
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Playtesting
- Prototyping
- Agile
- Kanban
- Pico-8
- Notion
- Jira
- HTML/CSS/JS
- Adobe Apps
- Affinity Apps
- Arduino
Other work I've done:
- Worked with a team to create an art installation for Meow Wolf Denver
- Wrote an article for Atlas Obscura
- Wrote a narrative game in Twine about summer days
- Created a cosmic horror narrative game
- Designed maps, gameplay, and hosted for Minecraft Hunger Games sessions
- Collaborated with a team and a local artist to build a sculpture that raised air quality awareness
- Created a haptic metronome.
01 FORZA MOTORSPORT (2023)
Won Best Racing Game and Best Accessibility from The Game Awards, and Racing Game of the Year at the DICE awards in 2023. Nominated for a Golden Joystick and BAFTA.
I was the principle economy designer ahead of launch, creating data models and designing player reward systems. Post launch I designed, organized, and implemented content for our live releases.
Racing
Xbox
PC
AAA Team
2023-2025
02 FORZA HORIZON 5 (PS5)
Won Best Audio Design, Innovation in Accessibility, Best Racing Game at TGA 2021. Won a BAFTA, Steam Award, and DICE Award in 2022. PS5 release was the second best selling game of April 2025.
To enable Forza Horizon to go cross-platform I helped design systems including friend/invite functionality, UGC content reporting, and 3rd party login flows.
Racing
PS5
Xbox
PC
AAA Team
2025
03 ISOPALZ
Isopalz is a simulation game where players interact with, raise, and take care of cute little isopods! Built as a way to stay in practice with scripting but also a chance to flex my level, systems, and narrative design skills.
As part of a two person team I’ve handled the level and game design, development, and production while my team-mate has handled the art and art direction.
Simulation
PC
2 person team
2025
04 VR ENVIRONMENTS
Using Unity and C# I built six different game environments for VRChat. These worlds are fully interactable with mini-games, player responsive features, baked lighting and more!
Built for fun, these were great exersizes in level, environment, and general game design skills. These worlds have been visited over 28,000 times by players in VRChat.
Social
VR / PC
Quest
Mobile
Solo Dev
2022-2025
05 PORTALS 3D! - Mobile
Designed 30+ levels for a mobile portal-based puzzle game while I worked at a hypercasual studio. Worked with an outsourcing studio as the design lead on the project while also authoring the levels using the Unity editor and Houdini.
Pitched the original concept, created design documents for each level and the overall game, led meetings and syncs with the team, and made adjustments based off of KPIs and analytics.
Puzzle
Mobile
Unity
Small Team
2021
06 HYPER-CASUAL WORK
While working at a hyper-casual stusio I pitched 3-5 original mobile game concepts and wrote 2-3 one-page game design documents for new mobile games each week.
I’d then work with an outsourcing studio and a producer to create a prototype, provide feedback to the engineering teams, and use internal KPIs and data to track how well these prototypes tested.
Mobile
Small Team
2021
07 GAME JAMS
Participated in several game jams creating small games in Unity, Godot, and Pico-8 as a way to keep up my game development skills.
I also host an annual game jam online, with the 2025 iteration having 180+ participants and 36 game submissions! For this event I streamed game dev tutorials, provided support, and also developed my own games with a small team.
PC
Web
Solo Dev
2019-2025
08 PROJECT BUFFALO
Project Buffalo is an alternative reality game that asks players to become digital archeologists as they comb through websites and discover the mystery within.
For this project, we created 3 websites, recorded a podcast, planted physical and digital clues, and wrote over 15000 words of story. My primary focus was on game design, but I also led the web design, project management, and audio production.
Web
ARG
Podcast
Small team
2021
09 STUDENT WORK
The Intern: 3D Unity game, led game design, production, and development with a team of 4.
Pandemic Relief: Pixel Pico-8 shoot-em-up, solo dev doing all the coding, art, and music.
Liv.e Online: Narrative game taking place using a fictional operating system exploring themes of isolation and connection on the internet.
Pinball Machine: Hand built using an Arduino controller to manage gameplay and display the player’s score.
Unity
Pico-8
Bitsy
Twine
Solo and teams
2017-2021