JOSIAH J HENDY
ABOUT ME
Hello! I'm Josiah Hendy (most people call me J), a Bristol-born game design student with a passion for stories and the ways we tell them. My gaming journey began during the seventh generation, with a party of digital monsters in my PokéWalker and a fiendish hand for swordfighting in Wii Sports Resort.
Over time, my fervour for games as a player turned into a desire to enter the medium as a designer and theorist. My first proper foray into the world of game dev was the 2019 BAFTA YGD Game Concept Competition, in which I was one of ten finalists in my category. While filling out my submission for the competition, I enjoyed the design process so thoroughly that I knew I wanted to go on to pursue a career in the industry.
As a designer, I am most interested in the unique affordances of video games as a storytelling medium, and how they can be used to enrich and imbue interactive experiences with soul.
My wish is to explore the immersive storytelling potential of the medium, and to create focused games that encourage player-driven immersive reasoning and fictional investment in a way that cannot be achieved elsewhere.
This love for cohesion in a project often places me at the intersection of specialisms when a part of a team. I find myself naturally slipping into the role of creative lead, due to my ability to maintain a vision, communicate openly and accurately with others, and pour my passion into my work, in hopes of building towards an end product that is distilled and meaningful.
My comfort as a leader at the crossroads of specialism also derives from my enjoyment of a variety of creative skills and pursuits. Design aside, I also have interests in art, music production, video editing, writing, worldbuilding, and so on. This drive to learn new things and build a diverse skillset has helped me grow as a developer, and allowed me to communicate better with people of similar or different specialisms.
When I'm out of the gaming chair, you can find me exploring the open air and paying a visit to woodlands, coasts and mountains (or just about anywhere with a water feature, really), or taking a book and sketchpad to a café downtown.
ART HOBBYIST
Drawing and painting have been a constant passion throughout my life. When I was a kid, I would create my own comics with my own characters and sell them to my classmates on the playground for 10p. Instead of printing copies, I would simply redraw the pages over and over since I enjoyed the process so much.
Art is still a large fixture in my life today; I continue to invent new characters and the scenarios I picture them getting into, and enjoy making environmental pieces that capture particular feelings or experiences that I've had. It excites me whenever my love for art as a hobby bleeds into my work as a game developer, whether I'm creating my own assets for a personal project, or helping explore and conceive the art direction for a professional title!
I'd love to hear from you!