Kevin Deng
Hey, I'm Kevin Deng. I'm a Systems Thinker and AI-Builder and I've been building games and products for over a decade.
I've always done both design and engineering and it probably stems from being a gamer all my life and playing in software and building experiences across the game companies I've worked at up and down the West Coast, a startup I founded to build Nomsters, and a recently transitioning into becoming an AI builder.
While I've transitioned my focus towards building more AI products, I still play games with my son as a gamer dad.
From dual-wielding game dev to AI builder
I grew up a gamer in Portland, OR. I studied computer science at the University of Portland, switched to game art at the Art Institute of Portland, and KIXEYE hired me in 2011 to write front end code on Backyard Monsters anyway. The decade after that was live games up and down the West Coast, at ArenaNet, King and Kabam, moving from UI engineering into leading UX and product design. The archive has the roll call.
Then I stopped joining teams and started one. I founded Googlyeye Monsters to build Nomsters, a nutrition companion RPG that merges a game you want to play with a health app you should use. It started with a team. By the end I was doing the design, the engineering and the business myself, because I had to, and because agentic workflows had made it possible.
Being dual-wielding stopped being a quirk. It became the job.
How I approach AI
Before AI, most of a product cycle went to deciding what to build, because building was the expensive part. Today that's flipped and when code is close to free, most of a team's time goes into the models, designing systems, and building the context that ship the experience. A designer who thinks in systems that can now be part of the build becomes invaluable.
My own tooling has morphed the same way. I've transitioned from building in Figma to shipping in AI IDEs like Cursor and have even had to build my own harness, FRACTAL, when the team needed something that worked in a corporate VM.
Teaching how to build toward a better tomorrow
One constant that's continued through my career is to always leave things better from when I arrived and it's mostly through teaching and mentoring. On Backyard Monsters I became the primary mentor on several of the game's proprietary systems. At Taunt I managed the interns and ran the design sprints. On Disney Mirrorverse my team ran the cross team workshops on the first time experience. Most recently I brought an engineering team that had not worked with Claude Code into agentic workflows and helped to design skills and workflows and 1:1 coaching.
It's how I try to apply my own sense of optimism and continuing to build towards a better tomorrow.
