Benjamin

Hall

This sunny day fellow is a

writer & creative director

with a thing for narrative design.

Settled in Oxford after a little over a decade in Hong Kong.

I was an agency copywriter for a long time, a scriptwriter in a strange time, and a game designer by the time I’d picked up the basics of Unity and Photoshop.

I write warm establishing words, enjoy the rhythm of written triplets, and try to keep things clean and succinct - unless the brief calls for something different.

ABOUT ME

I’m a UK-based Writer and Creative Director with experience in narrative, game design, and art direction. Approaching creative briefs with a mix of skills helps me to keep my work agile - finding and filling gaps, empowering colleagues, and polishing deliverables. Whether I’m working with words, pixels, polygons, or the lot of them, my process is built on good communication of ideas and thoughtful storytelling.

CURRENTLY PLAYING

RECENTLY PLAYED

SPECIALTIES

What I do

Writing

Over the last 15 years I’ve written scripts, reviews, ad campaigns, taglines, copy, and pitch decks. The more I write, the more I refine the process of connecting with a project’s identity and using simple language to communicate it effectively. Writing is the foundation of everything I do, so it’s also the starting point for the services I offer.

Game Design

From conception to feature completion, games present a goldmine of narrative questions to answer - what makes the experience compelling? Who is the target audience? How do the systems bolster the player fantasy? Which ones don’t? I’ve worked on design docs, pitched to platforms, designed levels and mechanics, and led a remote dev team.

Brand identity

The first and lasting impression of a business or product, my approach always begins with the vision and written tone. I’ve worked directly with designers for years to co-create logo marks, establish visual language, and choose the right fonts and colours to distinguish brands in the minds of their audience.

Creative Direction

Sometimes there’s a small gulf between a creative team and the client (or CEO) vision. Some of the most rewarding work I’ve done has involved bridging that sort of gap. From agency-work to in-house creative, I’ve got experience taking ownership of a brief and leading the team to deliver coherent content.

Things I’ve worked on

Featured projects

VIDEO GAME

Neon Death Pact

GAME DESIGN • CREATIVE DIRECTION • WRITING • BRAND IDENTITY • MECHANICS • ENVIRONMENT DESIGN • ANIMATIOn

Learning from failures is uncomfortable business. Neon is a very personal project built by a remote micro-studio and put on hiatus because sometimes work-for-hire has to come first. Running a studio taught me how to pitch (successfully) to console executives, how to blockout levels and find their fun, to design and animate characters, balance puzzles, and pull together polished vertical slices and builds. It also taught me hard lessons about feature creep, budgeting, and the need to pivot a company’s priorities. Game dev can be exhausting, but the experience is invaluable.

GRAPHIC NOVEL

DevaShard

WRITING • CREATIVE DIRECTION • WORLDBUILDING • LAYOUT • CHARACTER DESIGN

“The LOTR of Asia” is how the founders of DS presented their project - a lofty goal which came with a hefty tome (the Mahabharata) as homework material. As scriptwriter, I worked with an in-house team to conceptualise an action-packed reimagining of the ancient Indian epic. I created most of the characters and narrative beats, penned the script for 5 graphic novels, and wrote the treatment for a feature film adaptation.

NFT

The Cypherverse

CREATIVE DIRECTION • WRITING • BRAND IDENTITY • 2D ARt • VOXEL ART • LIVE STREAM • WORLDBUILDING

Work-for-hire takes you to all sorts of places, on this occasion my past work as an art director landed me a role working in an industry I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand. My part was simple and inviting: Sci Fi worldbuilding, reams of lore deep enough to fill a wiki, neon-drenched voxel art, and endless web viewer visual iteration. By the time I’d finished working with voxels, the team successfully launched the world’s first interactive 3D NFT collection.

SHORT STORY

The Circus of the Inconspicuisine

WRITING • ART DIRECTION

When Social Paper chose to tackle issues surrounding the future of food sustainability I was given an opportunity to tell a story about conspicuous (food) consumption. At its core, fiction uses make-believe to tell truths, this project was particularly rewarding because the truths are so salient and urgent.

MAGAZINE

Foodie

WRITING • EDITORIAL • INTERVIEWS • PHOTOGRAPHY • BRAND IDENTITY • COLUMNIST

A free guide to good taste in Hong Kong, I wrote for Foodie both as a staff writer and a copywriter helping to refine and establish their brand voice. The monthly publication was pulled together by a very small team, so I also got the opportunity to contribute print photography, restaurant reviews, and managed to interview a few of the chefs and restauranteurs in HK.