Pavan

Technical Designer

Background

I first started learning how to code as a kid because I wanted to make games. Then I got pulled onto the path a lot of people in India follow without quite choosing it, engineering, a good college, a software role at a respected company. Somewhere in there I lost track of the original reason I'd started. I did well on that path. I earned a degree from BITS Pilani and spent three years as a systems test engineer at Dell, working on the PowerScale distributed storage platform: designing test plans and working on internal testing tools. It was good work and it taught me something I didn't fully appreciate until later, how to reason about a system from the outside, by watching what it does under pressure rather than by reading the code.

I never stopped playing games or thinking about them the way a designer does. Always picking apart why a mechanic worked, or how I'd have built it differently. I'd just quietly filed "making games" away as something I used to want. What brought it back was Team Cherry's Hollow Knight, and later Silksong. Watching a tiny team build something with that much intention and craft made the dream feel concrete and reachable again instead of abstract. So last year I started learning Unity and C# in the evenings and weekends around my full-time job. The Dell work turned out to be more relevant than I expected. All these years of finding the failure modes that surface when complex systems interact in ways nobody designed for is, as it turns out, a decent instinct to have when you're building game mechanics.

What ties all of it together is one design target I keep returning to, the feeling a player gets when they make something happen that they came up with themselves and not a moment I scripted, but a situation they constructed using tools I gave them. I'm not trying to build content for players to consume. I'm trying to build systems players learn to author.

My goal is to become a technical designer at a studio building games with deep, expressive systems, the kind where mastery is a real and rewarding pursuit.

Current Projects

Afterimage is a 2D puzzle platformer built in 14 days. Your ghost replays your movement 1.2 seconds behind you. Freeze it and it becomes a solid platform. Teleport to it and you're where you were a moment ago. The interesting positions are the ones physics alone can't reach. Every visual generated at runtime in code.

Grapple Platformer is a 2D action platformer in Unity with a custom physics system. Movement IS combat: grapple tendril, shotgun recoil, and wall adhesion are symbiote-derived abilities, each distinct in use, all interconnected in play. The skill ceiling is spatial reading and creative routing. Fully playable and live on itch.io.

Doppelganger is a close reading of DMC5's Vergil Doppelganger mechanic and a design proposal for a game built entirely around it. The mechanic (a clone that replays your inputs through its own spatial context) is one of the most interesting combat systems in action games and goes almost entirely unexplored. The analysis asks what a game looks like when that's the only verb you have.

Skills

What I'm Building Toward

The problems I'm drawn to sit at the boundary of code and design, movement systems where skill feels physical rather than arbitrary, puzzle spaces defined by what the simulation will and won't do, emergent systems that produce authored feel from simple interacting rules. The competence I'm building is knowing what a physics behavior costs in implementation and how that changes whether you reach for it in a design document.

Dell Technologies | BITS Pilani ECE

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