Donald Barrett is a senior designer at Insomniac Games, a US-based company with three decades of innovative game development to its name.
Insomniac conceived the classic PlayStation characters Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet and Clank and has developed series such as Resistance and Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Barrett will be in town for Melbourne International Games Week, speaking at Games Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP), a networking and development event, and the Careers and Frontiers games education symposium.
Melbourne International Games Week 2025
- 4-12 October
- Across Melbourne, with home bases at ACMI and Fed Square
- Games Connect Asia Pacific: 6-8 October
- Careers and Frontiers: 9 October
- View the full program here
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
Barrett has been working in game design for more than 15 years. He began as an environment artist before landing a quality assurance job at Disney. He’s been with Insomniac for close to a decade, where he was recently promoted to senior game designer.
Barrett’s talk at GCAP will focus on the development and completion of The Flame side quest in Spider-Man 2. He was the driving force behind the development of The Flame arc, but the content’s completion required collaboration on a mass scale.
“[My team] were the ones who brought the content to life,” Barrett says. “The narrative writers, environment artists, lighters, VFX artists, SFX designers, gameplay programmers, animators, character artists, riggers, voice actors, localisation teams and dev support technicians all came together to make this a very special quest arc. I had the privilege of guiding them with my design vision for the content, and they trusted me through the process.”
The Careers and Frontiers symposium will underline how creativity, play, and innovation are integral to building a successful career in game design. Barrett’s career progression has been aided by a willingness to take risks and put himself out there.
After teaching himself Maya and Unreal in 2010, he was able to make his own game projects. The following year, he visited the DreamWorks Animation campus with one of their programmers, an experience that pushed him to work harder at his craft. A few years later, Barrett applied for an entry-level QA position at Disney Interactive, and once there, he pounced on the opportunity to create motion graphics for the Disney Princess IPs.
A colleague at Disney suggested Barrett apply for a production designer role at Insomniac in 2017, and he’s been climbing the design ladder ever since. The life of a senior game designer is highly collaborative and frequently challenging, Barrett says, but rarely ever frustrating.
“On the day-to-day, I get to articulate my creative vision by means of mission and level design in our game engine while collaborating closely with our asset teams. Every mission, quest, boss, or collectible content I’ve worked on has provided unique challenges that I have been able to overcome with the help of my teammates. I genuinely look forward to what I get to work on each day.”
Barrett has witnessed enormous commercial and technological growth in the game sector during his career, but he says the core principles of game design haven’t changed all that much.
“I have a background in environment art and making small games using Maya and Unreal, but once I landed my QA job at Disney, I became less interested in the technological advances happening around the industry and more interested in production practices, game design theory and execution, and people connection.”
Barrett is enthusiastic about the advances in photogrammetry, which allow for photo-realistic renders of environment art, props and human characters. “The new photogrammetry technologies are some of my favourite things I’ve seen in the industry and are something we have within our own production pipeline,” he says.
But, while the tech will always be advancing, Barrett stays focused on principle-based game development. “That includes good production practices, game design theory and execution, and people connection,” he says.
Barrett will explore these themes in greater detail during his two appearances at Melbourne International Games Week.
“I do believe those things are most important when developing games, and if developers aren’t holding to these standards, no amount of technological advancement can save their product,” he says. “I’ve been really impressed with some of the new indie studios cropping up within the last few years, and from what I’m seeing, many of them are holding to these standards and I think will grow to be some of the top game developers in our industry.”
Melbourne International Games Week 2025 runs across Melbourne from 4-12 October. Learn more about here.
This article was made in partnership with Melbourne International Games Week.
