DGDavid Geisert
Resume Get in touch

AI game designer · Rapid prototyper · London

I turn new AI capabilities into things people want to play.

I’ve designed games for 14 years, from Zynga and mobile hits to a $1M+ VR launch title, then spent five years prototyping AI and AR at Meta Reality Labs. Now I take new AI capabilities, turn them into mechanics, get them playable in hours, and playtest until they’re fun.

See what I bring Download resume

Worked with Meta Reality Labs · Zynga · Rocket Games · Coinflip Studios · Story Machine AI

Prototype with Unity · Browser / JavaScript · Cursor and AI coding tools · LLM agents · image, video and music generation

Portrait of David Geisert
100+
games shipped
$100M+
revenue from games I worked on
200+
playable prototypes
5 yrs
AI & AR prototyping at Meta

01

What I bring to an AI game team

What AI game teams look for, and where to find the evidence on this site.

01

A proven game design track record

14 years taking games from concept through iteration and player testing, at studios and on my own.

  • Led the team on Ninja Legends: one of the first post-launch Quest titles, $1M+ revenue, shipped on Quest, Rift, Steam and PSVR.
  • Product manager at Zynga, then lead systems designer for a run of mobile hits at Rocket Games.
  • 100+ games shipped, and $100M+ in revenue from games I’ve worked on.

02

A player-centric mindset

I design controls, feedback and onboarding first, then test with real players and simplify.

  • Kitty Kingdom: with movement as the only input, where you stand is the build decision. Players rated it the most fun game of its jam.
  • Jamference: I put Fun first in the rating rubric, and jam participants rate each other’s entries, so every game, mine included, is judged by the people who play it.
  • On Orion and in the Meta Connect demo, user studies and designed feedback made the system feel trustworthy instead of slow.

03

Creative thinking and a willingness to experiment

I look for the version of an AI capability nobody has played yet, and use constraints to get there.

  • Severed Heads, United Hearts: LLM courtiers as the core mechanic, tuned so they’re hard to win over but beatable.
  • Flicksync: your voice is the controller and an AI cast reacts. Won two categories at Creating Reality 2018.
  • I founded and host Jamference, a fortnightly AI game jam where every brief has a design restriction that pushes past the obvious use of AI.

04

Hands-on prototyping skills

I build the prototype myself, in high fidelity from day one, because fidelity is now cheap and it surfaces real problems sooner.

  • Cursor Party: a party-based survivor-like with 20 heroes, built in 2.5 hours. 4th at the Cursor hackathon.
  • Hexagon Tactics (Unity): LLMs and image generation create units in real time, with the deck designed around generation latency.
  • Every Orion messaging prototype built in Unity and tested on the glasses themselves, not stand-in headsets.

02

Selected case studies

The AI game jam I run, a shipped title, two AI game designs and two Meta prototypes. Each covers the problem, my role, and what changed because of it.

03

More games

Jam games and playable experiments, many with AI as part of the mechanics. Most run in the browser, so you can play them now.

More from the arcade

More games on itch.io

04

Jamference

Creative facilitation. A free game jam I founded and host, about making games with AI, out in the open. A new round starts every two weeks.

I write each brief as a theme plus a mandatory design restriction, and set the rating rubric: Fun, AI Use, Polish, Theme. Entrants show which AI tools they used and what each one did, and I make a game every round too.

The restrictions are the point. Designing with “No Text” or “Movement Input Only” pushes people away from the obvious use of AI and towards ideas that are new.

Visit jamference.com Read the case studyPrevious jams
  1. #1
    Cat and RobotRestriction: Movement Input Only · Oct 2026My entry, Kitty Kingdom, was rated Most Fun
  2. #2
    CraftingRestriction: Playable on Mobile · Oct 2026
  3. #3
    Great Works of ArtRestriction: No Text · Oct–Nov 2026My entry: Starry Meows

05

AI products & films

As founder of Story Machine AI I design and build AI products end to end, and make films with them to find out where they break.

Products

Films

06

Recognition

07

About

I started out as a game designer: product manager at Zynga, lead systems designer for a run of mobile hits at Rocket Games, then co-founder of the studio behind Ninja Legends on Quest.

At Meta Reality Labs I spent five years as a product design prototyper (IC6), building AI and AR experiences for Orion glasses and Quest and taking them from idea to executive demo.

My process is to get it playable fast, put it in front of players, and simplify ruthlessly. I prototype in high fidelity from day one, because with today’s tools fidelity is cheap and it brings out real problems earlier.

Talks & community

  • 2026

    Digital Champion of the Year, Camden Digital Inclusion, for AI talks and sessions for the Camden community.

  • 2025

    Made a music video live on stage in a 5-minute speed run at AI Tinkerers Demopalooza and won Multimodal AI. Watch it

  • 2020–25

    Ran the Reality Labs London demo fairs and grew them into Meta’s 2nd-most-attended.

  • 2021–now

    Admissions judge and mentor for StartX, Stanford’s startup accelerator.

Get in touch

Building games with AI? Let’s talk.

I’m happy to talk about AI game design and prototyping roles, playtesting AI mechanics, or Jamference.