Michael Rud -A Developer's Journey.

Founder, Game Producer & Lead Game Designer

Founder of Playwood Studio with creative and operational leadership of a small 4-7-person team, producing two indie games from concept to commercial release across various platforms.

Production & release

• Founded Playwood Project and produced Wartile and Successor on $1M+ budgets, releasing across PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, Tilt Five AR and Meta Quest VR.
• Ran Wartile and Successor through Steam Early Access to 1.0 and beyond, scheduling and shipping 29+ patches and 28+ content updates, including a DLC for Wartile.
• Managed the release process for both games, coordinating store pages, build and depot management, and marketing beats with the team, publishers and partners.
• Built roadmaps and submission schedules with team leads, cutting or delaying features when schedules slipped or the technology fell short, to keep the Quest release and the Steam 1.0 on track.
• Ran day-to-day sprints and refined production processes, moving static documentation from Confluence to live Miro boards and replacing standups with lightweight daily check-ins to keep the team’s creative momentum.
• Maintained the gameplay and feature backlog, assessing design decisions and priorities.

Game design

• Lead designer on combat, character, and enemy systems, defining abilities, balancing stats, tuning AI behaviors, and iterating on feel across Wartile and Successor.
• Designed procedural and scalable game systems used in Successor to support live updates.
• Designed and implemented levels in Unreal Engine 5, establishing gameplay loops, pacing beats, encounter flow, and aligning with environment art direction.
• Led world-building, narrative design, and quest structures, crafting lore, player progression arcs, and story beats for campaign-sized sections.
• Contributed hands-on to prototype game mechanics, using node-based blueprints in Unreal Engine 5.

Players & community

• Set up playtests and feedback loops for the team, running in-house sessions and collecting 1,000+ player responses from Steam playtests through Google Forms, which we turned into scope decisions.
• Grew the Wartile and Successor communities, writing 132 Steam news posts for 30K followers and 2,400+ social posts across X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Discord, reaching 6K+ followers.

Platforms, tech & quality

• Led the PC-to-VR port of Successor for Meta Quest, restructuring pipeline and workflows mid-production for Android hardware, and adapting controls, UI and audio for VR.
• Led a 7-week QA effort for Meta Quest that ended in approval on the Meta Quest Store, and supported PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo readiness with Deck13 for Wartile.
• Used AI in production during the Quest port, analysing crash logs and Unreal performance captures and generating code fixes, which helped the team find and solve bugs faster.

Partners, funding & studio

• Coordinated remote and external partners, including co-development studios, outsource vendors and publishers, and scheduled quality gates across time zones.
• Negotiated publisher deals with Deck13 and Oculus Publishing, and reported progress and risk to publishers and investors throughout development.
• Raised $1M+ in investment and grants, building the project budgets, forecasts, business cases and pitch material behind each round.
• Ran the studio’s operations, including hiring, salaries and contracts, office, budgets and bookkeeping for a cross-disciplinary team of 5–7.

Game Designer / Lead Designer

• Managed the game design backlog and supervised a team of 4–5 game designers, aligning priorities, reviewing work, and coordinating feature delivery with leads, producers, and the game director across milestones.
• As Product Owner, designed systems and features for pre-mission economy & progression covering equipment, gadgets, intel, and upgrades, built for a live-service model so new content could be added without structural changes.
• Designed, prototyped & communicated core gameplay systems, including stealth, interactions, and disguise, with clear documentation so other disciplines could use and implement them.
• Developed soft prototyping for HITMAN, a paper/board game method that tested mechanics and level design to validate the fun factor and reduce costly rework.
• Prototyped missions and levels with a strong focus on player agency, systemic gameplay, and replayability, collaborating closely with a cross-disciplinary team to prepare and validate production-ready content.
• Facilitated comprehensive playtesting with User Research, including on-site sessions in the US with North American audiences, and synthesized feedback into actionable design improvements.

Environment Artist

• Prepared levels with set dressing and for art outsourcing, ensuring assets and layouts were production-ready and met the visual art direction.

Environment Artist / Lead Env Artist

• Supervised a team of 3–4 artists, managing workflows, pipelines, and quality standards to ensure consistent output across levels.
• Contributed environment art and level design across multiple stages of production, translating the project’s visual direction into cohesive in-game environments.

Master’s Degree, Digital Design

• Graduated with a Master’s Degree in Digital Design, specializing in Game Design. Received BA in Ceramics and Glass in 2001.

Student

• Three-year business-focused upper secondary education.

Guest teacher and mentor

• Guest teacher and mentor at DADIU (National Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment).

Guest lectures

• Delivered guest lectures introducing game development to students (5th–9th grade).