indie
PROJECT: iced coffee
current project
Project: Iced Coffee is a narrative mobile game and debut project for Studio Tilia, a new indie studio that I’m founding and directing. Iced Coffee was recently selected for ELEVATE 2023, a grant and mentorship program funded by Netflix and run by WINGS and Code Coven.
The game takes place over simulated social media, following the story of the player character and their best friend as you untangle a mystery involving an international boy band as the fandom community unravels. We’re using real photography for the artwork, with photoshoots inspired by real-life boy band sensations like BTS and One Direction.
Iced Coffee is NOT a dating sim or a horror game- it’s just a drama, and drama it delivers. Despite its stylish veneer of k-pop aesthetics, the narrative takes the players to surprising places, and asks them: how far will you go to solve the mystery?
We have a pitch deck and demo (for web, Android, and iOS) available for interested parties.
🍑🍾👞 (peach vodka)
2020
Playable on itch.io, 🍑🍾👞 (peach vodka), is a dating sim that takes place on a simulated mobile phone. Across several different apps, players search for clues leading to the owner of a peach vodka-stained shoe left at their house the night after a party, in a modern and playful twist on a Cinderella story.
A team of four friends and I created it during a week-long game jam, so it’s very prototype-y… and yet, 🍑🍾👞 has over 50,000 views and over 30,000 plays (combined ~25k+ plays on web and ~5k+ downloads on Android) on Itch, with absolutely no marketing campaign. Players find it simply by searching on Itch, and it has frequently been one of the top 5 games tagged kpop on itch for the last few years.
I engineered the game and wrote the story, dialogue, and content. I’m also the teammate who suggested we use emojis for the title, for which I have no regrets 😉 (you can call it “peach vodka”).
Caterpillar
2018
Caterpillar (playable on itch.io) is a small project I made about my personal experience with gender dysphoria. In it, you’re a caterpillar crawling around on a bed of magazine scraps of men’s body parts- which I cut out from actual magazines- and eating them to create a dream bod.
Caterpillar was featured in the 2019 Indie Bits Festival, an event which highlights interactive media made by southern game developers.
limit theory
2017
Limit Theory was a procedurally generated space exploration game with 4X elements. Although the game was ultimately cancelled, working on it was life-changing for me since it was where I built a foundation of 3D math skills that I used to learn graphics programming.
For LT, I architected systems to procedurally generate space ships in Lua in an in-house engine. Every vertex of the meshes are generated from scratch; there are no hand-made 3D objects used.
I also worked on a tool to allow players to use this system to customize ships in the game for the demo we showed at Pax South 2018.
I wrote bi-weekly devlogs on my process on the Limit Theory forums; here’s a summary post of my thought process in case you’re curious.
game jams
2016-2020
I love doing game jams, especially the Global Game Jam (although I haven’t since Covid started!), and I’ve participated in 6 total.
I utilize jams to practice design skills and try out new ideas over practicing engineering skills. So far, I’ve made a couple of different dating sims, a rhythm game, and a few visual novels, all in Unity.
AAA
Warcraft: Arclight Rumble
2018-2021
At Blizzard, I worked on Warcraft: Arclight Rumble, a mobile real-time action-strategy game.
I was the engineer primarily responsible for graphics and optimization, including writing the shaders that all of the VFX in the game use and building shaders and tools for special effects like the water.
I also analyzed our project and built our asset budgeting strategy, setting limits for art memory usage and budgeting our shader use so that we could reach our target FPS on our oldest targeted devices without setting our player’s phones on fire. Only a little bit of an exaggeration- before optimizing, our playtests usually resulted in phones becoming too hot to hold; after I set budgets and we spent a few months addressing optimization issues, that stopped happening.
I established a version control strategy to our artists and ran an instructional meeting for them on how to use git. Before that meeting, we had multiple interruptions daily for version control issues; after that, we only had an issue once every week or two.
I also gave a talk at an internal tech art conference with our VFX artist on our collaboration strategy, helped run a super-unofficial game jam, and was a Blizzard LGBTQ Council member and ran a volunteer event to benefit our local LGBTQ center.
COMMAND & CONQUER: RIVALS
2016-2017
I worked at EA as an intern in college on popular mobile collector game Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and full-time after college on C&C: Rivals.
On Rivals, I worked in an in-house engine with C++, and wrote gameplay code, shaders, tools, and engineered a system to manage the lifetime of VFX. On Galaxy of Heroes, I wrote a Unity tool for QA to analyze the battle and damage systems.
I’m pretty sure my credit on Galaxy of Heroes is the reason why people keep hiring me to make mobile free-to-play versions of beloved sci-fi and PC gaming franchises, which fans of course love… Never read the YouTube comments.