About Layton

I’m a Game Designer and Creative Leader with well over a decade of experience shipping compelling gameplay from high-level to hands-on across 15 titles and to millions: Snapchat Games (Bitmoji Party, Fashion Icon etc), and at Halfbrick (Fruit Ninja LiveOps shipping to its Xbn lifetime players).

✦ GAME DESIGN

Owned, designed, balanced and shipped features and content across most facets of design, including building Snapchat’s original games platform from the ground up to XXXm players as a senior member of the founding team. Lead Designer on numerous flagship projects including Snapchat’s first AR game Ghost Phone, and UGC community-driven sandbox Fashion Icon.

✦ CREATIVE LEADERSHIP & COLLABORATION

Led multidisciplinary teams of 3-10 developers; feature strike teams, prototyping, R&D, and end-to-end production. Shepherd of the game vision, pillars, milestone progress and forged clear communication channels between internal and external stakeholders. Directed goal-focussed and collaborative brainstorming encouraging holistic, inclusive decision-making and feature development.

✦ TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION

Hands-on understanding of many disciplines: shipped 3 titles solo, progressed from novice to pro in internal engines while helping improve tools/workflows, and have implemented production content including levels, user interfaces, scripted events & more. Rapidly created and scripted playable prototypes in proprietary engines, Unity, UE 5, and on (the classic!) paper.

I fell in love with the process of game design from a young age (and have the drawings to prove it). Since that time I've honed my skills leading teams and creating robust gameplay, plus refining it with intentful iterative improvements, even in highly experimental design spaces. I've had the privilege to share some of what I've learned while speaking internationally at Casual Connect Singapore and Casual Connect San Francisco, as well as in Melbourne at Game Connect Asia Pacific - you'll find some of my talks here.