civax

About

Ohad Barzilay

Game Designer · VP Product · Studio Founder. Twenty-five years shipping things people play.

Press kit

Formal —
Studio —
Candid —
Talk —

Short bio

Ohad Barzilay (online: civax) is a game designer, product executive, and three-time founder based in Ra'anana, Israel. He has worked in the games industry for over twenty-five years, founding Deepmist Studios, Mytopia, and New Legends Studios, and serving in senior product roles at Ilyon, Tacticsoft, Fantasy Flight Games (Digital), and Justplay. He is a founding member of GameIS, the Israeli game development community, and is currently building Playdreams, an AI-powered game development platform for the Godot engine. His writing and side work focus on the seam between human craft and machine intelligence in software.

Long bio

I'm Ohad Barzilay — known online as civax — a game designer, product executive, and founder based in Ra'anana, Israel. I've worked in the games industry for more than twenty-five years, since the late 1990s, in roles that span hands-on development, design, production, and senior product leadership.

I've founded three studios over that span — Deepmist Studios, Mytopia, and New Legends Studios — each a different lesson in product, team-building, and market timing. As VP Product I've led product organizations at Ilyon, Tacticsoft, Fantasy Flight Games (Digital), and Justplay, shipping titles played by millions across mobile, web, and PC.

Today I'm building Playdreams, an AI-powered game development platform for the Godot engine. The bet is simple: the next decade of game-making will be a conversation between human craft and machine intelligence, and someone needs to build the language for that conversation. I also maintain Tivdok, a Hebrew-language fact-checking tool, on the side.

Before any of the studio work I was a kid in the demoscene. I was part of the group Moon Hunters, contributed to MOVEMENT'96, and helped run CFXweb, the Israeli scene portal of its day. That work — writing intros in assembler, optimizing for kilobytes, sweating over palette changes — is still the foundation of how I think about software. I'm also a founding member of GameIS, the Israeli game development community.

I write occasionally — a few essays a year on games, AI, and the seam between them. Available for advisory and consulting, selectively.

Location
Ra'anana, IL
GitHub
@civax
Twitter / X
@civax
LinkedIn
ohadbarzilay
Bluesky
@civax.net
Email
ohad@civax.net

Career arc

2024 —

Now: Playdreams and the AI seam

Today the work is Playdreams — an AI-powered game development platform for the Godot engine. Describe a mechanic in plain language, get a working scene with code you can ship.

The bet is simple: the next decade of game-making will be a conversation between human craft and machine intelligence, and someone needs to build the language for that conversation. The thesis isn’t generation — it’s the iteration loop. The system that lets a designer try eight variations of a mechanic in an afternoon beats the one that nails a perfect first draft in twenty minutes.

On the side I maintain Tivdok, a Hebrew-language fact-checking tool. Started during the 2024 information chaos and grew into something I keep maintaining because Hebrew-language fact-checking is underserved.

2017 — 2024

VP Product across mobile and live-ops studios

[era image: logos]

The “senior product” decade. VP Product roles at studios shipping games to millions: Ilyon Dynamics (Candy Cascade and the studio’s reusable economy framework), Tacticsoft (Battle Dawn: Empires, the alliance economy and season cadence), Fantasy Flight Games (Digital) producing the Twilight of the Gods digital edition, and an extended advisory engagement at JustPlay.LOL through the Playtika acquisition.

Adjunct teaching at Reichman University (IDC Herzliya), on and off through this period. Operations and product at FGG (Dance Sparkle). And board / audit committee work at GameIS since 2017.

1995 — 2016

Earlier: Studios, Mytopia, and the demoscene that raised me

[era image: screenshot]

Three studios founded, a Facebook social-gaming exit, and a decade of teaching and hands-on game-making before the senior-product chapter started.

Mytopia was the big one — co-founded as Real Dice; rebranded to Mytopia and grew into a cross-game social platform on Facebook at the height of the social-gaming wave. Acquired by 888 Holdings; stayed on post-acquisition as COO and Chief Creative through the integration. New Legends Studios came after — squad-based strategy RPG with a procedurally-generated campaign map; the studio’s failure taught me more about product than any of the wins did.

Deepmist Studios was the first — founded in 2003, ran for over a decade. First-person RPG with a procedural exploration system; the engine work outlasted the game and became the foundation for everything I built after.

Earlier still — the demoscene. Part of Moon Hunters, contributed to MOVEMENT’96, helped run CFXweb, the Israeli scene portal of its day. Writing intros in assembler, optimizing for kilobytes, sweating over palette changes. The discipline of fitting a working program into 64KB is still in everything I build.

In parallel: instructor at Beit Berl College for over six years (Java, graphics, AI, OpenGL); editor-in-chief of Mobile Game Developer Magazine; mobile team lead at GamearraY (a JVP Studio startup); and producer/designer at Side-kick Games on a Rovio title.

Experience

Teaching

Community & publishing

Speaking & conferences