The Design Lab was founded by Myles Blasonato, a game designer, design director, lecturer, and researcher with experience across traditional games, blockchain projects, education, and interactive storytelling. Myles has worked with teams connected to projects such as God of War, Heavy Rain, and Destroy All Humans, and has spent years teaching, writing, and consulting on how games create meaningful player experiences.
What began as a personal portfolio and design blog has grown into something larger: a platform for exploring, testing, and applying new ideas in game design with a team that brings together more than 20 years of combined experience working on a wealth of titles.
At the centre of The Design Lab is Immersive Design, a developing design approach focused on how games create believable, reactive, and meaningful worlds. Rather than treating immersion as just graphics, story, or atmosphere, Immersive Design looks at the systems underneath the experience: the rules, behaviours, affordances, feedback loops, and player choices that make a world feel alive.
The Design Lab exists to turn those ideas into practical design thinking. Through articles, research, consulting, workshops, and design analysis, we explore how games can move beyond surface-level immersion and create deeper relationships between players, systems, and worlds.
This thinking has also led to the creation of Immersive Softworks, a game development label and offshoot of The Design Lab. The Design Lab explores the theory, language, and craft of Immersive Design, Immersive Softworks is where those ideas are put into practice through actual games.
The team’s goal is simple: use our experience to craft amazing immersive games to share with the world.
We are interested in games that respond to the player. Games where systems connect. Games where the world pushes back. Games where players are not just following instructions, but learning, experimenting, interpreting, and becoming part of the simulation.
You can explore Myles’ design writing on the blog, learn more about our teams’ development capability and how we may help you through services, or follow the development of our games through Immersive Softworks (more coming soon!)
The Design Lab is no longer just a place to talk about game design. It is a place to test what game design can become.
Grab Myles’ FREE ebook now and find 15 indispensable design patterns that will equip you to craft exceptional Web3 gaming experiences. We’ll also notify you when his new book on immersive design is out!