Hello! My name is Banning Day, and I design games.

About Me

As both an undergraduate and a master’s student, I attended the University of Utah’s top-ranked Entertainment Arts & Engineering program.

I was drawn to EAE and game design in general because of an innate desire to generate art & tell stories via the tools of technology. I learned Photoshop at an early age (in fact, I don’t remember a time without it), and have since been following a winding road of experimentation with as many digital mediums as I could discover. Illustration, graphic design, and web development gave rise to investigations into film, video editing, and animation. From there, it was a short leap to uncovering the joy of 3D modeling and, soon after, game design!

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to participate in the development of over a dozen games, experiences, and research projects that attempted to tap into various aspects of player engagement.

Though I direct my focus toward game and level design, I am always excited to learn more every day about this robust and seemingly boundless medium. The problems posed by this industry have broad formal causes, innovative applications, and highly nuanced developmental challenges – more than enough to keep a budding professional on their toes.

I am most excited by how we might use game design to approach questions related to structures of human perception, cognition, and affordance.

How do a few simple rules, as well as the stratification of emergent patterns, allow for easy integration of knowledge and expedited understanding of context? Maybe the answers to these sorts of questions will allow us to inject some fun & engagement into a complex & not-often-user-friendly world.

Projects

Hogwarts Legacy

October 2018 - August 2021

I had the absolute privilege of contributing to the latest chapter of the Wizarding World’s storied saga. Hogwarts Legacy is an immersive, open-world, action role-playing-game set in the 1800s.

I am so excited for the game’s release - both so I can play it, as well as share here all that I worked hard to achieve in the experience of the gameplay & story.

As a Game Designer & Mission Implementer, my responsibilities included:

• Interfacing with Story Team to collaborate on the development of compelling game design

• Implementing play areas, combat events, FX, & other game content along key mission lines

• Presenting gameplay & story concepts to senior design team, adjusting designs & metrics based on feedback

• Building basic layouts using Maya, kit sets, Blueprints, & proprietary tools

A Walk in the Woods

January 2017 - May 2018

A Walk in the Woods is a 4-player, cooperative race against time. Each of the four players are dropped in separate sections of a randomly-generated forest, and must find each other in the harrowing maze while avoiding a giant monster and his legion of minions.

The game is made up of a 5x5 grid of authored tiles that snap together at random locations and orientations. My main job was to facilitate the design and creation of these tiles. What you see to the left here are some progress pictures of how the actual space of the forest came together.

As Lead Level Designer and Game Designer, my contributions include:

• Pipeline design and standards maintenance of tile creation

• Rules & parameters authoring for the handling of tile adjacency & asset usage

• Collaborated with gameplay & enemy AI engineers, artists, and designers to ensure full maintenance and cohesion of design functionality & systems across tiles

Virtual Medical Records

May 2017 - May 2018

Diabetic Dental Story (otherwise known as Virtual Medical Records) is a Virtual Reality experience turned Public Service Announcement that attempts to use the intuitively motivational medium of storytelling to keep the adverse effects of diabetes salient in the minds of its sufferers. The goal here being that patients exposed to this experience will be more likely to seek regular treatment.

The project is still undergoing clinical trials and is not available for download.

As Designer and Artist, my contributions include:

• Narrative design - storyboard, script, aesthetic continuity, pacing

• 3D asset creation and implementation (project uses both found as well as fully authored assets), complete virtual world construction

• Facilitation of design discussions with research partner to progress project in an iterative manner