Game Design
10+ years of publishing games, winning game jams, and facilitating awkward yelling in public.
In the future I’d like more opportunities to improve existing game designs, or create them from scratch. My unique ability with game design is transposing feelings to mechanics, but also hunting down and fixing critical game design problems.
Games on page: Twilight Tower, Meta Form, AaaAaAaAhhHhH, The Abandoned, Kickochet, Cereus, ProtoDash, Deckest Dungeon, 10 Minutes to Y2K, Skylands, Reach, NEGATIVE, SIWOTI, Ro Sham Bot, Skeleboarder, Misc
Twilight Tower started as a color palette game jam featured by Itch.io, various festivals, and turned into a multi-year project with a team of five and many publishers expressing interest. Roles: game design, UI, some writing, team leadership and, some programming.
Published on Itch.io. Created during early COVID era, about the feeling of being trapped inside, escapist desires, different perspectives, and grappling with existential dread in an absurdist way. Favorite fan comment: “made me cry.” The game mechanic is about obtaining and combining words to unlock progression. I did the game design, writing, programming, UI, music – everything but the illustration. Part of the Ukraine and Abortion support bundles on Itch.io that raised millions. Featured in Indiepocalypse issue #12.
AaaAaAaAhhHhH was originally created for the 2020 GMTK Game Jam theme “Out of Control” in 12 hours and was placed top 100 by community voting. I have since been approached twice to have this game displayed in large festivals in Germany. This was a solo project and utilized a color palette tool I made.
The Abandoned started as an experiment to create a “unique look” for a game with the illustrator c0hil and eventually combined with an accuracy RPG mechanic I was experimenting with. After presenting the game at Dreamhack, Disco Elysium changed the way I thought about games and I eventually moved on to other projects. Would love to come back to this concept one day.
After “winning” the 2019 GMTK Game Jam, we decided to turn Kickochet into a full game to strike while the iron was hot. The team, originally gathered for the fun of a game jam, proved to be too unwieldly as the scope grew too large and COVID became a reality. Development stopped. The game is still great and loaded with fun mechanics – it’s just unfinished. I did the game design, programming, project management, UI, and video production.
After making several small games, it was time to learn how to market and launch an official game. Of course, I had to over-scope and also completely redo the game design twice. It launched on Google Play, App Store, and was presented at CasualConnect in Disneyland. While the game might not look like much, fans praised the game design and maintained a 5 star rating. Every game made after stands on Cereus’s shoulders. What I did: Everything.
ProtoDash is a one button game where you charge up and release a dash to fight robots. Your landing point does more damage based on how accurately it centers with the position of the robot you dash to. Game jam version was 34th place overall.
After playing a lot of Gwent in Witcher 3, I just had to make my own card game and I co-opted a Ludum Dare jam to do it. I eventually made a post-jam cleaned up version and was able to sell a non-exclusive license. I did the game design and programming. One of my most popular games. Ludum Dare game jam version earned 12th place in Graphics.
10 Minutes to Y2K was a small two week project with a couple other developers from the Society of Play (online game development group). I learned a lot about collaboration with good programmers and this ultimately led me to decide to focus on game design and team up with other programmers. I did the UI design and programming, as well as co-game design and initial game design docs.
A quick preview of some games I’d love to blab more about, but this page could go on forever if they each had their own section.