Mariusz Lesniewski
Game Director | Principal Game Designer | AR Enabled Product Strategist
Game and product leader with 13+ years of experience across indie, mobile, and AAA environments, turning ambiguous ideas into clear interactive products and shippable experiences. My background across direction, design, production, publishing, and studio building helps me align creative vision, execution, and stakeholder needs without losing sight of the player or user. Alongside that, I am building a practical AI product practice focused on useful systems, better workflows, and real business value. I am most effective where strong creative direction, product thinking, and emerging technology need to come together in one coherent, user-centric experience.
Key Achievements
- Defined a new creative vision on a critical multi-million AAA project within two weeks, restoring direction under heavy ambiguity.
- Shipped Uragun while rebuilding the team model and creative structure for a 25+ person studio.
- Built an AI product practice and founder-style initiatives spanning i.a. computer vision, AI/ML decision support tools and agentic systems.
Current Focus
- Hands-on AI prototyping across app, game, and interactive concept work.
- Current work is centered on meaningful AI, product design, workflow improvement, and building systems with real business value.
- Comfortable shaping early product direction where interaction design, creative vision, and technical possibilities need to evolve together.
Experience
- Took over an AAA multi-platform and multi-million project at a critical stage and defined a new creative vision within two weeks, giving the team a clear direction under heavy ambiguity.
- Reframed the product direction in response to stakeholder changes and delivered a new mobile-focused prototype without losing momentum.
- Directed a full production cycle that delivered a playable demo in five months and earned strong external benchmark feedback.
- Led the shipped multiplatform title Uragun while aligning design, production, and execution around a coherent product vision.
- Introduced agile production processes and mentored leads across design, art, and engineering.
- Rebuilt the studio structure, hired senior talent, and shaped the creative direction and team model for a 25+ person development team.
- Worked inside the Daftcode ecosystem, collaborating with innovation-minded teams and experiments adjacent to startup-style product development.
- Led design and production work for a mid-core mobile title plus multiple hyper-casual prototypes in a fast iteration environment.
- Designed systems and balancing for top-performing mobile titles including My Hospital and My Spa Resort.
- Partnered with studio leadership to define product vision and production pipelines across larger multi-discipline teams.
- Built and ran an indie studio that shipped Imps in Tokyo, a cult title featured in the US App Store and covered by major outlets.
Skills
Game Direction, Product Design, Creative Leadership, Cross-Functional Team Leadership, Product Strategy, LLMs and GenAI, AI Prototyping, Interactive Systems Design, Rapid Prototyping, Agile Production, Stakeholder Alignment, Core Loop Design, Economy and Balance, Retention and Engagement Design, Unity, Unreal, UX and Wireframing, Vendor and Publisher Collaboration
Education
- Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAI and ML: Leading Business Growth
- Warsaw School of Social PsychologyPostgraduate Studies in Negotiations and Mediations
- Lazarski UniversityLaw Degree