John Berges

I'm John Berges, a Lead Designer with over 15 years of industry experience, having designed at Maxis, Scopely, Gameloft, and more!

I've created major features for two multi-billion-dollar franchises, and am hopeful to soon be a part of another. Delivering experiences that so many cherish is the ultimate honor, and I’m always searching for teams looking to achieve that goal.

Systems design is my specialty and passion; I'm especially drawn to how game systems provide a means no other medium has for conveying narrative and elliciting emotions.

I thrive when designing these intricate systems to be scalable and modular, finding clever solutions given constraints, and when ensuring each piece of a game serves the bigger picture.

I'm also deeply invested in all aspects of game creation, with Professional-level Expereince in Content Design, Economy Design, Quest Design, Progression Design, Coding/Scripting, Production, Music Composition, Sound Design, Consulting, Mentoring, Team Management, and Process Improvement.

John Berges on LinkedIn

More about me:

I'm motivated by the opportunity to create things that make people smile. In addition to composing hundreds of songs while designing games for a living, I've written both a Science Fiction novel and Mixology Compendium in need of publication, I foster a drumming hobby, and I take any opportunity for wordplay in all its grand and terrible forms.

Professional Design Work

Electronic Arts

I've was lucky enough to get to create many popular systems and features in The Sims franchise, including:

Sims 4: Build Mode
Sims 4: Aspirations and Whims
Sims 4 Get to Work: Aliens
Sims 4 Get to Work: Scientist Career
Sims 3: Edit Town Mode
Sims Social: Build/Buy Mode
Sims Social: Quests
Sims Social Relationships

And much more!

My 15 minutes of fame:

Scopely

At Scopely, I was a Lead Designer on two amazing projects:

Monopoly GO!
- As the social minigames Lead, I helped shaped many core experiences in Monopoly GO!
- Designed, Scripted, Tooled, and Tuned Adventure Club, a new genre of casual minigame blending aspects of blackjack and escape rooms into an 8-player social narrative

[Unrealeased Puzzle Game]
- As Lead Designer, I created systems that
  - Blended match-3 gameplay with real-time simulation
  - Drove dynamic narrative beats which gave each player a unique story.

Gameloft

I spent some time at Gameloft, where I was Lead Systems designer on Spiderman Unlimited

Designed Multiplayer Systems
Designed New Game modes

Storycraft

At Storycraft, I was lead designer, helping to shape an ambiitious product looking to blend cozy games with AI storytelling

Created all systems and core loop mechanics
Created and tuned the game's full complete live economy
Created and tuned all Progression and Advancement

Independent Projects

When contractually able, I also work on independent game projects, providing design, music, and coding.

The Hero's Code

When the protagonist of her classic adventure game's world goes missing, Ginny, an NPC shopkeeper, shirks her duties to follow the clues and set the world right. However, in doing so, she upends everything believes and everything she cares about...

The Hero's Code is a humorous and heartfelt deconstruction of classic top-down adventure-games

Playing as an NPC stuck in a partially-completed game, the player will find themselves

Traversing dungeons in reverse, un-solving puzzles from boss-room to entrance
Using standard items in weird and unexpected ways
'Sequence breaking' and subverting action-adventure RPG tropes
Trying to dislodging other NPCs from their programming with varying degrees of success

Art by the talented Erin Dean

Student Projects

As part of Cornell University's game design program, John first discovered his love for game development, while designing and writing the OSTs for may student projects from 2005 to 2007.

These games were made by a team of students who all went on to successful careers in the game industry and movie industry, and they're still available to play for free!

Click the banners!

Google Sites

Report abuse