Building Worlds; One Carefully Crafted Moment at a Time
I build worlds meant to be discovered, not just passed through: hidden callbacks, collectibles tucked into places you’d only find by being curious, and small touches that make a player feel like someone made this encounter on purpose, for them.
Somewhere in every game I’ve touched is a moment built just for the person who goes looking for it. Stick around, there’s a decent chance you’ll find one here too.
Resume/ Professional Timeline
Game Designer
- Punch Up Games
- 2026 – Present
At Punch Up Games, a tight-knit co-op of indie developers, I work across the entire lifecycle of a game, currently including our public-facing title, Dig Too Deep. One day I’m prototyping a new concept from a blank page, the next I’m musing about goblinomics trying to make a crafting loop involving goblins feel fair. I often find myself refining a UI element to fit more cleanly on screen without losing readability, and scaling icons to look just so. I research what’s working in other titles and adjacent genres to find mechanics and loops that might resonate with players. I’ve also taken on a lot of the connective tissue work that small teams need: managing our document repo, setting up shared tools for collaboration, and helping wire up our social media automation.
The craft side is where I spend most of my time: balancing systems so a game feels earned rather than easy, writing lore and unlock progression that make a system feel like it belongs in its world, and weighing in on how we structure telemetry data so it can scale as the games grow. It’s a different kind of design work than the AAA studio environment I came from: smaller team, faster iteration, and a much broader hand in each game.
Game Designer
- Amazon Game Studios
- 2024 – 2026
At Amazon Game Studios, I worked as a level designer on New World, Amazon’s live-service MMO. A significant part of my day-to-day was kitbashing terrain and quest objects into believable spaces, then hooking up the animations, scripts, and engine-level mechanics that made them playable. I sat in on design meetings for combat encounters and world boss fights, weighing in on what would make a fight feel dangerous without feeling unfair, and helped design and refine gameplay mechanics and UI elements with an eye toward accessibility and screen real estate.
I also personally chose the locations for and hand-placed over 1,000 collectibles across the world. One of those placements was a heartfelt farewell note I wrote, meant to be a goodbye from the devs to the players, tucked away on a secluded island. It drew an unexpectedly strong emotional response from players when they found it. It’s a good reminder that even the smallest, most out-of-the-way detail can matter to someone.
QA Business Intelligence Lead
- Amazon Game Studios
- 2021 – 2024
QA Tester
- Anthem
- 2018
QA Tester
- MechWarrior Online
- 2012
QA Tester
- Battlefield 2142: Northern Strike
- 2006
Meet the Designer,
Jason Bowes
I fell in love with games in a test lab, not a bedroom. My dad worked at a graphics chip startup during the dot-com boom, and some summers I’d tag along, a nerdy 11-year-old surrounded by the newest hardware, free vending machines, and testers with usernames like Null Stryker and Zero Cool. After I beat one of them one too many times in Quake II deathmatch, he handed over his handle as a trophy: Motornerve. I’ve used it ever since.
That summer taught me something I didn’t have words for yet, that you could choose who you were inside a game, and that the people building these worlds were leaving pieces of themselves in them. Around the same time, exploring the StarCraft map editor, I found a Firebat hero unit named Gui Montag, a nod to Guy Montag, the book-burning fireman from Fahrenheit 451, which I’d just read for a five-dollars-a-book deal my dad struck with me to get through the “100 Greatest Books” list. That tiny Easter egg stopped me cold. Someone had built a private joke into a strategy game, and I’d found it. It felt like being let in on a secret.
I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since, first as a player, now as the person trying to build it for someone else. I want the spaces I design and the systems I tune to reward the kind of curiosity that used to send me combing through games looking for the next hidden reference, the next detail that says somebody made this on purpose, for you.
Professionally, that meant testing and building games for most of my adult life, sometimes for a paycheck and sometimes just because I couldn’t stay away. I’ve worked both sides of the table: running player research and analytics for a live-service MMO, then moving into hands-on level design, building encounters, prototyping mechanics, and writing the lore and environmental storytelling that turn a space into a story. Off the clock, I’m usually deep in a co-op survival crafter with friends, (Valheim and Satisfactory get an unreasonable amount of my time), unwinding in something atmospheric like Subnautica or Horizon Zero Dawn, or piloting an oversized robot in MechWarrior, which, yes, I’ve also tested professionally. Some things just stick.
Before I ever considered myself a designer, I considered myself an artist.
Accolades & Articles
Praise
“When it came to working on Nighthaven, we simply wouldn’t have been able to do it all without Jason. Having not been trained as a level designer before the zone, he learned and then tackled populating, tuning, and even shifting the geometry of 4 Inquisition locations, and 7 Spider locations, one of which was Esagile, the home of Uttu, the spider boss.
If you need someone to stealthily place 241 some lore notes into a zone with little to no notice in order to provide hours of enjoyment for players, Jason will be there for you. And somehow he still found time to write 122 of them!”
“Jason Bowes is an example of someone who was born to be a game designer.
Jason is a bloodhound for detail, dedicated to the craft of narrative storytelling in this interactive medium. I counted on Jason so much throughout the development of Nighthaven that I breathed a sigh of relief whenever I would assign him a new task – as he was confident, skilled, and prepared to deliver AAA quality work on any issue or problem that seemed to come our way.
Jason is a profoundly talented narrative and level designer, and is the secret sauce of so much of Nighthaven’s success in so many small and big ways. I would work with him, hire him immediately, and be proud to stand alongside him on any project thus forward. He has impressed me beyond belief as a talented, thorough, and accomplished master of the art of video game storytelling and design and writing.
Jason is a secret weapon, reliable, dependable, and has earned my trust a thousand-fold.”
Contact Jason Bowes
Open to new opportunities in level design and game development, and always glad to connect with studios, collaborators, or fellow designers. Send me a note! I’d love to hear from you.
- 2026 Jason Bowes. All Rights Reserved.