Games: game
I ship software people play: video games, apps, and creative infrastructure. I’ve built mixed reality systems for real world exhibitions, cultural heritage, scientific research, and design previsualization. I care about the layers beneath the surface of interactive software—editor tooling, technical art, and performance—and how to design systems that learn from the people who use them.
About
I ship software people play: video games, apps, and creative infrastructure. I’ve built mixed reality systems for real world exhibitions, cultural heritage, scientific research, and design previsualization.
I care about the layers beneath the surface of interactive software—editor tooling, technical art, and performance—and how to design systems that learn from the people who use them.
BACKBONE
An immersive horror, first-person stealth exploration game spanning approximately 30 minutes, rendered with NTSC analogue-style graphics that mimic the rainbow iridescence of 1970s television. My contribution to the C.H.A.I.N. 3 network, BACKBONE continued directly from the start node and dramatically expanded the exposition, connecting to three other nodes in the collaborative graph. The game recreates an early 70s midwestern basement—a childhood memory of one of the lead characters—using modular architectural assets to build an atmospheric period environment. Technical features include an inspection system for environmental storytelling, a phone call system for delivering dialogue sequences, and stealth gameplay driven by enemy AI running on a finite state machine with procedural and physics-based animation. As a critical structural node in the network, BACKBONE bridges multiple narrative threads while establishing key mechanical systems for subsequent developers.
C.H.A.I.N. 3
The third entry in the C.H.A.I.N. experimental series, this project is a mass-collaborative game that brings together over 120 developers from the Haunted PS1 and wider indie communities. As co-director and lead technical developer, I created a comprehensive infrastructure to support decentralized creative production at an unprecedented scale. This included a real-time analytics dashboard for developers to collaboratively map the game network, a PHP-based build system with automated itch.io syncing for rapid testing, and other purpose-built coordination tools. The project establishes a new paradigm for mass collaborative game development, replacing previous Google Sheet-based workflows with a robust system for over 100 simultaneous contributors across a branching narrative.
Soap Soup: Sodium
An atmospheric exploration game created for the 2024 SOAP SOUP collaboration, a modding project where artists create abstract rooms using a fixed set of elements. My entry is a sensory experience that places the player in a sodium-lit parking lot on a midsummer night. I designed a soundscape of cicadas and a distant storm, and used sophisticated spherical projection mapping for the visuals, focusing on creating a realistic and immersive atmosphere of warm light and deep shadow.
The People's Sky 2
The fifth iteration of the People's Tree project series, developed as the centerpiece for the 2025 Madvent launcher. I was invited by the junior team—who had taken over the launcher technology and coordination—to contribute this game for continuity with the series. My contributions focused on technical refinement: redesigning and optimizing the input system for significantly improved panning and zooming controls, recoloring and reskinning the visual aesthetic, and optimizing data serialization and loading sequences. The project marks my transition from lead developer to technical consultant, supporting the next generation of Haunted PS1 organizers.
Experimental Games Workshop
A presentation at the Experimental Games Workshop (EGW), held during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. With co-presenter Adam Pype, I discussed our project C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D. and the collaborative work of the Haunted PlayStation 1 collective. The EGW is a GDC tradition of over 20 years that showcases games at the forefront of gameplay, organization, and creative direction. A full video is available in the GDC Vault, linked above.
GENESIS 2K24
A head-tracked rhythmic rail-shooter that traces the cyberspace aesthetics of Rez (2001) back to their origins in Chicago's art and technology scenes. In collaboration with Charles Voita and Bill Derrah, I led the development of this remake of my 2023 entry for the C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D. project. The game reimagines the Electronic Visualization Laboratory's (EVL) 3D vector graphics for Star Wars (1977) and incorporates head-tracking from the CAVE system (1992), set to Phuture's genre-defining Acid Tracks (1985). It was exhibited at the BitBash 2024 festival.
C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D.
A large-scale, collaborative follow-up to C.H.A.I.N., this project connects over 40 developers' games into a branching narrative. After each entry, the player chooses between two games, representing forks in the timeline. My primary contribution was designing the technical architecture that enabled this branching to occur within the launcher itself, rather than individual games. This key decision made the project feasible to implement across multiple engines and contributors. You can play the full collection here and read an interview about the project.
Madvent 4: End of the Line
A custom launcher for the 2023 Madvent event, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 creators release games daily throughout December. As lead coordinator and launcher developer for the series, I created a fully dynamic train that journeys through various biomes and navigates twisting terrain to connect the individual games.
Genesis
A light-gun game inspired by vector graphics that reimagines the credit crawl sequence from Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001). I developed this game as my submission for the C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D. collaboration. The project served as a personal platform to explore new technologies, including motion-captured camera techniques, synchronizing gameplay to music, a blocking system for sequencing events, and vector-based rendering.
The People's Sky
The fourth iteration of the People's Tree project, The People's Sky is an experimental game exploring community building by enabling players to design items, append messages, and place them in a shared digital space. For this iteration, I developed several key features, including data-transfer optimizations, new 'trace' visualizations to show player exploration paths, comprehensive analytic logs for post-experiment analysis, and a web application for content moderation.
Haunted Ps1 Demo Disk: Spectral Mall
A custom launcher for the 2022 Haunted PS1 Demo Disk, a curated collection of games selected from hundreds of community submissions. I led the software development for the launcher, which included all coding, gameplay programming, UI design, and tech-art. I was also responsible for organizing the broader collaborative effort.
Córdoba Court
Córdoba Court is an innovative social game I designed and developed to foster community building. Modeled after the communal patios of Córdoba, Spain, the game invites players to cultivate a shared virtual environment, expressing their individuality by designing personalized totems from millions of possible combinations. The project serves as a social experiment in digital placemaking and community greening practices. A report is also available, which analyzes player content and observed behaviors.
Madvent Calendar 3: Necrosis
The official launcher for the 2022 Madvent event, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 creators release games daily throughout December. In my role as lead coordinator and launcher developer, I was responsible for organizing the event and building the application that unites all the contributed games.
The Peoples Tree 2
The second iteration of the People's Tree project, an experimental game exploring community building in networked spaces. I created this application to allow participants to design ornaments and leave messages on a communal tree, offering a unique blend of interaction and shared digital space. The project served as a valuable opportunity to develop new technology, establish policy frameworks for user-generated content, and conduct comprehensive analytics on player behavior.
Haunted Ps1 Demo Disk 2021
A custom launcher for the 2021 Haunted PS1 Demo Disk, a curated collection of games selected from hundreds of community submissions. As the project lead, I was responsible for organizing the collaborative effort and for the launcher's software development, including all code, gameplay programming, UI, and tech-art.
Where's Home?
An experimental prototype that successfully translated the unshaded, minimalist aesthetic of Rococo into a more complex, architecturally descriptive style. The concept was a sequel to the People's Tree project set in an abstracted Union Station, Chicago. For the prototype, I developed a custom Rhinoceros plugin to optimize and export modular architectural elements, and created a system to randomly place around 100 unique characters and their luggage throughout the scene. While the core technical art was a success, the project was paused to allow for more design iteration on its complex dialogue system.
2 Madvent 2 Calendar
An ornate launcher for the 2021 Madvent event, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 developers release small games daily throughout December. For this event, I both coordinated the project and single-handedly built the launcher application to house the collection of games.
Puzzle Generation
A dungeon generator where monsters trawl on fixed and cyclical paths, creating a looping temporal structure where an agent attempts to reach the end in the shortest amount of forward steps. I developed this using Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to solve for a sequence of moves in time rather than a shortest traversal path in space, as a final project for a course in algorithmic design.
Rococo
Rococo is my first complete game, built solo in two weeks for the Haunted PS1 Summer of Screams jam. The player bounces on a jelly-like linoleum floor through a child's dream of a deconstructed kitchen, reaching for a floating jar of cookies. Two inputs, three minutes — I focused on making one interaction feel inevitable through custom shaders for an unlit, candy-colored look and a physics-driven sound system that ties audio to the player's motion. An epilogue was added days after release in response to players wanting to stay in the world. Rococo reached 4.6★ across 218 ratings with 109 comments over five years of organic discovery — more individual ratings than any Haunted PS1 collective release except the two flagship Demo Discs.
Drip
A dreamlike ball platformer created in one week for the C.H.A.I.N. collaboration. My task was to create a sequel to a first-person hospital game. To meet the deadline, I used Grasshopper for procedural level design, creating a large, open dreamscape where the player floats downwards. This parametric approach allowed me to efficiently place collectibles, asteroids, and hazardous tentacles along splines with random variation, directing the player's movement through the vast space.
Minotaur
Minotaur is a simple game experience that served as my earliest experiment with embedded analytics. For this project, I built a system that records play sessions and sends summary data back to a Clowder server. This work enabled long-term data collection, and the results from over three years and thousands of play sessions are analyzed in this report.
The Madvent Calendar
An ornate launcher for the inaugural Madvent event in 2020, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 developers release small games daily throughout December. For this first event, I coordinated the project and built the launcher application to house the collection of games.
C.H.A.I.N.
An early collaboration by the Haunted PS1 collective, C.H.A.I.N. was an experimental game series with a unique structure: each developer received a game, created a direct sequel, and then passed it to the next person in the chain. I participated in this project, contributing my own entry, "Drip." The unpredictable, flowing nature of the narrative was a gratifying success, and the experiment's popularity directly led to the creation of a more ambitious sequel, C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D., in 2022.
The Peoples Tree
The People's Tree was the first in a series of experimental games I created to explore community building in networked spaces. In this project, players design ornaments and leave messages on a shared tree. It was my first opportunity to build the underlying technology, develop content policies, and run analytics for a live, public-facing application. A key finding from this and subsequent projects was an unexpectedly high player return rate of 15-30%, suggesting that players felt a personal stake in the collectively-designed artifact and returned to observe its evolution.
Sloppy Joe
A prototype for a dungeon crawler set in the Rococo universe, created to test a unique ground-based movement mechanic. In this demo, I implemented a system where the player navigates on a rolling seat, bouncing off walls and turning in 90-degree increments. The project was also an experiment in pushing the Rococo aesthetic in a darker visual direction. The prototype can be played here.
Nightmare House 2
A skybox for a free horror indie game that replaces the outside environment, working at ground level and when on top of a tall tower. I created the skybox using a combination of Vue rendering and photocollage with a program called Skypaint which manages perspective-correction when editing.