.About Me
I am a game and technical artist based in Bristol, UK. My background is in software engineering, which means I tend to think about art problems like systems problems. I spent a few years in Turkish game studios working across everything from character art to UI to shader development and pipeline tooling, and then completed an MSc in Commercial Game Development at UWE Bristol with Distinction.
My MSc dissertation was GyroFit (Grade 85), a sensor-based serious game that used phone gyroscope data and a TensorFlow/ONNX machine learning pipeline to generate personalised workout plans in Unity. It raised more questions than it answered, particularly around how adaptive systems could respond to a user’s emotional and cognitive state rather than just static profile data. That question led me toward affective computing and player modelling as a research direction.
I am currently part of a voluntary research project at UWE Bristol, supervised by Dr. Nikolaos Ersotelos, building an AI-driven 3D avatar of a lecturer using an LLM backend, real-time lip sync, and Unity. I am looking for a funded PhD position in serious games, adaptive AI, and affective computing, with a focus on health and neurodevelopmental support. I also serve as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.
Outside of work I like making things for fun, usually 3D art in Blender with no particular deadline. Unity is where I spend most of my time professionally. I also enjoy figuring out why something does not work, which turns out to be useful in both development and research.
Links
ORCID: 0009-0002-4534-4192
LinkedIn: kivanc-guney
ArtStation: xaqior
CV
Kivanc Guney 