All my life I’ve been a fierce force of imagination, persistence, and hard work: like a dragon hunting for gold. But instead of treasure, I’ve been searching for stories to tell and ways to make an impact.

Born in Belarus, I studied journalism in Bulgaria and worked in marketing in Russia, but storytelling has always been my true passion. I create narratives that allow people to explore fresh perspectives in a safe, immersive way.

As a queer, neurodivergent woman from a patriarchal country, I’m passionate about shedding light on complex topics through my work. Over the years, I’ve designed more than 100 LARP games, written 10+ original tabletop campaigns, and worked as a script supervisor on the short film Mein Name Akim (2024), which tells the story of transgender refugees in Germany.

During my MA in Serial Storytelling at IFS Cologne, I honed my skills across genres, working on solo projects as well as collaborating in Writers' Rooms.

Currently, I’m co-developing a visual novel game with a co-author as a passion project.

Now that I've completed my degree, I’m eager to bring my creativity to TV and gaming, crafting stories in both English and German.

Dragons never stop breathing fire. And neither do I, with an endless flow of ideas and stories I can’t wait to share.

Alena Lysiakova

🎧 Too much sound can ruin your audio game.

Audio designers love layering: music, background ambience, footsteps, breathing, radio static, wind, distant sirens, and emotional underscore. 

And suddenly your “immersive experience” feels like standing inside a broken washing machine. 

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most people don’t play audio games in perfect silence. They’re commuting. Cooking. Walking. Folding laundry. 

Audio storytelling competes with real life. If your game requires 100% concentration at all times just to understand what’s happening, you’re designing against the format.

Cognitive overload is real:
🐲 Constant SFX + dense dialogue = fatigue
🐲 Overlapping voices = confusion
🐲 Permanent music bed = emotional flattening
🐲 No breathing room = listener burnout

Immersion doesn’t come from “more sound.” It comes from intentional sound. Silence matters. Contrast matters. Clarity matters. Design audio like oxygen.

Good audio narrative design respects the listener’s brain, because the worst experience isn’t “hard,” it’s exhausting.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames

Alena Lysiakova 🐉

Narrative designer and screenwriter ▶️ Let's create stories that make an impact

Here’s something most audio writers don’t plan for 👉 players will mishear things. 


Names. Instructions. Locations. Important clues. And no, it’s not because they’re inattentive. It’s because audio competes with real life.

If your entire branching logic collapses because someone misheard “Mara” as “Nara,” that’s not player failure. 👉 That’s architectural fragility.

Designing for mishearing means:
👾 Avoid critical distinctions that rely on similar-sounding names
🐲 Reinforce important information through variation, not repetition
👾 Use context to clarify meaning instead of assuming perfect recall
🐲 Make systems resilient to imperfect listening

In audio, clarity isn’t about simplifying the story. It’s about building redundancy intelligently. The player shouldn’t need studio-level focus to follow your game.

If your structure only works in perfect silence with perfect attention, it’s not built for the real world.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames #InteractiveStorytelling

The uncomfortable truth about writing for audio: sometimes experience gets in the way. 🐲 


I coach a lot of writers transitioning into interactive audio, and I keep seeing the same pattern: the more experienced the writer, the harder it can be to adapt.

Not because they’re not talented, but because they’re used to controlling the frame.

In audio, you don’t have visuals to lean on. You don’t have text people can reread. You don’t have cinematic shortcuts.

You have a voice. Timing. Space. Silence. Choice phrasing. Cognitive load.

And if you try to force screenwriting logic or prose logic onto audio without adjusting, the story simply doesn’t breathe. 

💡 Audio is a different architecture. It demands different pacing, different exposition control and different emotional calibration.

That’s why transitioning with a coach helps. Not because you don’t know how to write, but because someone needs to point out the invisible friction early.

You can read all the documents you want. Clarity usually comes when someone listens and says, “This works. This doesn’t. And here’s why, specifically for audio.”

Different medium requires different muscles. And once they click, audio becomes addictive.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames #StoryCoaching

Dating used to be awkward dinners and nervous eye contact… now it’s co-op bosses and shared loot drops. 🎮💘

In my latest article, I dig into why playing together is becoming the new dating, and how games are quietly reshaping connection, chemistry, and even heartbreak.

👉 https://lnkd.in/eU6XgMn8

If you’re into storytelling, relationships, or just fascinated by how games intersect with real life feelings, this one might hit a nerve.

#GamingCulture #Storytelling

Open article: Why playing together is the new dating by meer.com

🎧 Your audio game must survive interruptions


People don’t play audio games the way they play visual ones.  They’re walking. Cooking. Commuting. Someone asks them a question. A notification pops up. The subway arrives.

And suddenly your carefully crafted scene is paused for five minutes.

🐲 When they come back, the player shouldn’t feel lost. That’s why good audio narrative design builds re-entry points into the architecture, those small structural cues that help the brain reconnect:

👾 A character briefly restating the immediate goal
👾A reaction that reminds the player what just happened
👾Environmental cues that re-establish the situation
👾A choice that naturally summarizes the stakes

These moments are navigation; because audio games exist in the middle of real life, not inside a perfectly controlled gaming session. 

💡 If your story only works when the listener gives it uninterrupted attention, you’re designing for an ideal player that doesn’t exist. Good audio architecture assumes interruptions and quietly guides the player back in.

#audiogames #narrativedesign #storyarchitecture

All screenplays benefit from being visual. 
💡 But for vertical storytelling, it’s not a nice bonus: it’s survival.


In a traditional film or TV script, you can sometimes get away with dialogue carrying the scene. Two characters talking in a room can still work if the emotional stakes are strong enough. In verticals, that scene is dead on arrival.

The viewer is watching on a phone, often half-distracted, scrolling with their thumb, ready to abandon you at any second. If nothing visually happens, the story simply disappears. 👉 Vertical scenes need immediate visual signals.

You don't need long exposition or dialogue. Just one visual action that tells the entire story beat.

🐲 That’s the real discipline vertical storytelling teaches you: if the audience can understand the moment without sound, you’re probably doing it right.
#Screenwriting #VerticalSeries #Storytelling

In visual games, players always know where they are. There’s a map, a UI, and a quest log. Basically, something grounding them.

In audio there is nothing like that. Which means if you don’t deliberately build structural anchors, your story starts to drift.

Structural anchors are recurring elements that help listeners orient themselves without realizing it.

It could be:
🐲 A specific location you return to
🐲 A character who always reappears between major beats
🐲 A ritual moment (a radio check-in, a diary entry, a nightly call)
🐲 A recurring sound cue that signals transition

These anchors are architecture. Without them, scenes blur. Branches feel random. The player doesn’t feel lost because the plot is confusing; they feel lost because there’s no spatial or emotional reference point. Audio needs repetition with intention.

When players hear that familiar voice, that recurring space, that structural checkpoint, their brain relaxes. Orientation returns. Engagement stabilizes.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames

Just added another tool to the storytelling toolbox. 🎮

I’ve completed the course “Unreal Engine 5: Blueprint Scripting 101.”

As someone who usually lives on the narrative side of games, it’s always interesting to peek under the hood and understand how the systems actually work. Turns out Blueprint logic is not nearly as scary as it looked at first glance.

More ways to connect story, mechanics, and player experience — always a good thing. 🐲 Now back to building worlds.

Open article: Udemy Course Completion Certificate by ude.my

I’ll be attending Series Mania Forum on March 24 to 26.


Do you want to talk series and verticals? 🎬  
🐲 Let's meet and talk over coffee in Lille. 

#SeriesMania #VerticalSeries #Networking

Norris Panton

Experienced fitness operator. Commercial experience in leisure and hospitality. Start-up mentor and coach.

Founder

Supporting great people. Challenging social injustice. Doing good stuff.

“Are you Isobelle’s dad⁉️

I used to get recognised in my own right.

Now I get flagged down because of my daughters.

And honestly?
Best rebrand of my life.

Nothing makes you “big-up” your chest quite like being beelined by good good people who think highly of your kids. Not their grades. Not their trophies. Them.

🤩 Gorgeous 
🤩 Kind.
🤩 Confident.
🤩 Happy.

My girls have been described (via association) as:

👇🏾 Force of Nature
👇🏾 Real Superstar
👇🏾 Manchester Gold
👇🏾 “You… but with long hair” (personal favourite)

There was a time when I cared about titles, panels, job descriptions, the corporate pecking order.

Now?

If my three daughters walk into a room and leave it better than they found it, that’s the KPI.

Forget personal brand.
Build humans.

If your greatest achievement isn’t on your LinkedIn profile…

You’re probably doing it right.

Thanks Alex Ayin  and PerformX Live  

Isobelle Panton Emily Panton Sophie Panton

No alternative text description for this image

“You can dig graves and you can play chess.”
– MobLand

Most of us have more than one skill. 🤷🏾‍♂️

🪏 We’ve dug the graves. 
♟️ We’ve played the chess.

But no matter how high we climb, we should never forget where we started. Even when we breathe the rarefied air of CEO, we should never be too grand to roll our sleeves up and get our hands dirty again.

Two types of CEO: 

Corporate CEO
Vs.
The Owner, CEO, majority shareholder

One is more focused on corporate governance guidelines and stakeholder relations.
The other will basically crawl through broken glass to protect what they built.

A “friend of mine”, big tings in the industry explained to me:

For one, “ CEO is just a job, albeit a big job”

For the other, “it’s the roof over my family’s head and the food on their table. It’s way bigger, it’s life and death”

Both have responsibilities but.
Only one loses sleep.

In business, people with skin in the game move differently. 

✅ They’re calmer in chaos. 

✅ Not easy to intimidate. 

✅ When things get tough they go H.A.M. 

✅ Slower to quit.

So the question isn’t what title you have.

It’s this:

Are you only ever playing chess?

Or are you still digging graves.

Let’s discuss…See you at PerformX Live  🤩

#CEO 


Loren Holland William Rasmussen-Dean  Danny Costello Ryan Johnston Marc Diaper Steve Orton Jake Fullerty  GAIN Gulf Active Industry Network

Old friends and new 👊🏾

Super to catch up with Darren Golden  Exigo®. 30 years of building some of the best equipment in the business. Always looking to the future, only innovator I know in Rochdale. 🤷🏾‍♂️

Nice to meet Ekow The Engine Essuman, what a humdinger of a fight against Jack Catterall end of last year. Good things ahead for this humble hardworking champion.

3 guesses what we talked about At PerformX Live ? 🤩

#boxing #fitness GAIN Gulf Active Industry Network  Ekow Essuman

“Rumours of my demise are greatly exaggerated.”

Pretty sure that was Mark Twain.
Feels appropriate.

Dinner last night on The Palm.
Traffic light.
Booking easy.
Perspective intact.

For a region that’s seen more “combat action” and “regime change” headlines than most, this isn’t new territory. The soundtrack changes. The resilience doesn’t.

In unsettled times the choice is stark:

Hibernate.
Shrink.
Refresh the news every 12 seconds and let anxiety rent space in your head.

Or

Crack on.
Show up.
Back your people.
Refuse to let anyone make your world smaller.

We live in the Middle East. Optimism is a built-in feature 

Thanks to the well wishers who checked in.
I’m good. We’re good.

This too shall pass. 🤷🏾‍♂️

Samantha Burke Gemma Hughes  #dubai

Hot air ⁉️

I once read that “every company is a marketing company.”

True.

But not every company markets like a challenger brand with nothing to lose and everything to prove.

When Rory McEntee , CMO of GymNation  (nee Gymbox , nee Paddy Power ), took to the stage at PerformX Live , I swear there was wolf whistling, cat calling and borderline hysteria. For a second I thought we’d wandered into the warm-up set at a Deirdre O’Kane gig.

The man doesn’t “present.”
He just casually owns the room.

It’s less keynote, more pub chat with 300 of your closest mates. Irish lilt smoother than a pint of the Black Stuff. But here’s the thing, beneath the banter? Absolute gospel.

Challenger brand marketing for world domination apparently rests on five pillars:

	1.	Unapologetically position yourself differently
	2.	Ask forgiveness, not permission
	3.	Get comfortable being uncomfortable
	4.	Take on your legal team and your board
	5.	Have some fun marketing

None of it revolutionary.
All of it rarely executed.

Most brands want challenger results with corporate behaviour.
Doesn’t work.

If you’re going to rattle cages, rattle them properly.

Best talk I’ve seen at an industry event. Ever.

And no, that’s not hot air.

#GymNation
#Guinness
GAIN Gulf Active Industry Network

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