Unnamed Ecosystem Survival Game is a survival game built off a highly systemic and highly balanced ecosystem simulation. Players must navigate survival and extractive profit off a fully dynamic and highly balanced food chain. Hunting and selling creatures is necessary for profit, but go too far and the ecosystem itself to collapse, leaving the entrepreneur to starve.

This game called for fine-tuning of systems. It brought the unique challenge of creating a system tuned to stay balanced in perpetuity on its own, but to be subject enough to instability that player actions could create a runaway impact. Design was built around pulling players in two opposite directions, one of moderation to ensure stability and the other of maximizing profit score. This created a unique player conflict which explores the challenges and complexities of real-world environmentalism.

You and your SoCal surf gang went North for a surf in San Francisco, but ran into a bunch of angry motorcyclists! Speed back south to San Diego in the SURF ROCK road trip adventure Beach Car! Balance risk and reward, stay ahead of the motorgang while keeping your ride running!

In crafting this short text-adventure for my course “Art of the Game,” many pieces of my game design process were stripped back and focused on to create a clearly-documented, powerfully-tested, and finely reflected result. This project brought unique challenges in adding a high-speed car-chase driving game feel to the typically slower text adventure format. The intentionality of my design process as documented helped create this unique and accessible experience for players.

Pop-Off is a genre-blend between rhythm game and turn-based RPG in which players battle against top pop icons. Developed for the Girly Pop Game Jam, Pop-Off blends the aesthetic and systemic in a simple yet precise way. Varying rhythm difficulties and asymmetric rhythm sections for different party members create an interesting risk-reward feeling in this battle of the bands.

Build Your Own Platformer is a creative tool helping players build their own platformer game levels and players. Easy-to-use, yet with a robustness and level of user freedom rare in typical level builders.

Gravitation is a Newtonian-gravity-based Crystal-Quest-esque arcade game (initially developed to procrastinate on a college astronomy assignment). Carefully built and tested simulation to ensure fair challenge to player while still creating chaotic feel.

Dice Bowling, created for GMTK Game Jam 2022 with the theme “roll of the dice,” is an arcade game about throwing a dice (yourself) around a table to mow through hoards of coins. High rolls make you effective against coins while low rolls make you vulnerable. Keep on moving to keep the odds in your favor!

Initially developed for Ludum Dare 46 before later being fleshed out, “It's About Slime” is an arcade game in which a gang of milkmen, each with different milky movesets, keep the last milk trees alive against infinite hoards of purple slimes. Through fleshing out this game's different maps, player characters, and multiplayer mode, I pushed my skills with balancing different movesets, creating diverse and highly-replayable gameplay that still provides a fair challenge across combinations. Additionally, I worked throughout the game's iteration to increase and hone game feel, ending in a simple yet unique and satisfying arcade experience.

The Fog is an atmospheric exploration platformer in which players gather lanterns to survive a mysterious and sinister fog in an abandoned landscape while fighting off creatures of shade and trying to uncover the nature of the fog. Released in 2019 as one of my first completed large game projects, The Fog certainly shows its age. Regardless, it taught me an incredible amount in all parts of game development including level and mechanical design, player progression, music, atmosphere, playtesting, and balancing, all skills which have enabled me and continued to develop for the projects to come.