UX and Game Designer

Daniel Ross

AKA Tounyre

A multi-disciplined designer based in Manchester, UK.
Passionate about HCI and storytelling through gameplay.Please check out my portfolio and feel free to get in touch by email, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

• Portfolio
• About Me

About//

Daniel "Tounyre" Ross

My initial interest in game design stemmed from playtesting for Ubisoft and trying to articulate just why I liked certain competitive games and mechanics more than others, which lead to me approaching gameplay from a more philosophical approach, and a genuine interest in HCI and UX as a whole beyond just games.

I have an avid interest in all forms of art in order to try round out my view of the world and acknowledge where my inspirations lie.Usually a massive lore nerd in any game I am invested in.

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Favourite Games
Counter-Strike, Old School Runescape, Magic: The Gathering, Rimworld, Final Fantasy XIV, Terraria, Genshin Impact, Street Fighter 6Hobbies
Cooking
Gundam Card Game
CQB Airsoft
Doom Scrolling Fan Art

UX Design Document

Rember

Rember is a SRS-learning based flashcard app that I conceptualised and designed to address general flashcard apps with a more approachable (and intuitive) format.

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Dissertation (With design document)

All Will Be One:

Exploring Magic: The Gathering Set Design in the Context of Pre-existing Intellectual Properties

I aimed to explore just how Wizards of the Coast adapt external IP and their narrative into MTG and created a custom deck attempting to implement both these concepts and my understanding of Magic's design as a whole.

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Portfolio//

Project Coven

An action game about void touched 'witches' fighting for a humanity they no longer belong to.

About

Project COVEN was my final year group project at university that certainly was a learning experience.I was the project director as the idea started with initial concepts I had put forward.The concept started as a thought exercise in how to adapt the concept of the Japanese Magical Girl genre into a grittier, western current day or near future setting.How would it adapt Western-European magic folklore? How do we explain them not being common knowledge? What are they even fighting? What actually is magic? I began compiling a set of world building concepts to then flesh out characters and details around.This setting-first approach that created an exhaustively long lore glossary was done in order to try make a game around a cohesive and consistent world with mechanics to build towards the tone this wanted to achieve. Sadly, I can't say what I got done in the 6 months working on it achieved this goal, but I learned much in that time, and who knows? Perhaps I'll return to it in future.P.S. I'd be more than happy to show design and writing documents upon request.

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Portfolio//

rember

Rember is a SRS-learning based flashcard app that I conceptualised and designed to address general flashcard apps with a more approachable (and intuitive) format.

About

The idea for Rember comes from a place of general annoyance at the go to flashcard application, Anki, or more specifically it's android app AnkiDroid. It was designed back in Android 1.0 with absolutely no changes since, and the times and mobile app design has since moved on.This design document was an attempt at exploring that.

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Portfolio//

Disser
tation

I aimed to explore just how Wizards of the Coast adapt external IP and their narrative into MTG and created a custom deck attempting to implement both these concepts and my understanding of Magic's design as a whole.

About

The dissertation explores the criteria the designers define for:
- Core Concepts of MTG, particularly the colour pie
- General "top-down" thematic-first MTG set design
- Why Wizards identify IP as being appropriate
- How they aim to implement itWhile unfinished, I would like to share some of the custom card designs, flavour adaptations, and the design document that accompanies it.

My favourite design: Prophetic Deluge is a unique design I genuinely wish was in the game proper. It could certainly do with being less verbose but Magic's rules has a very particular grammatical structure that must be followed, and I wanted the card to play a certain way that unfortunately had to make it a lot longer than just 'For each opponent, give them a choice of either sacrificing a non-basic land you choose or you get to fetch a basic land'. Also it would definitely be basic plains, not basic lands, but that would be best left to another pass at designing this as a custom deck.Additional Update in 2026: The dissertation actually aged quite poorly. In the document proper, I wrote recommending against fully integrating collaborative content as if done consistently it will corrode the unique identity of one's own product. This was in the Spring of 2024, prior to Wizard's autumnal announcement of future Universes Beyond sets being fully legal in all formats.
Since then, the Final Fantasy set was (somewhat unfortunately) really, really good, and massively successful to boot. This in turn has led to Wizards doing less releases within their own setting to make way for more crossover content, half of which the sets have been incredibly poorly received, with many fans now stepping away from the game.