hi! i'm z.

Hi! I'm a graduate game designer making games about liminality and memory. I'm also interested in horror, social games, fantasy, and sci-fi... amongst other genres! As a designer, I primarily work and am most interested in specializing in gameplay, level, and systems design. I've spent my studies primarily learning to work with Unreal Engine 5.

Outside of game dev, I'm a huge fan of baseball (go Dodgers!) and I love spending time with my partner and my cats. I read a lot of comics. I'm a big fan of DC, and I'll read pretty much anything James Tynion IV puts out. I also... love to play games! Some of my favorite games include Final Fantasy VII, World of Warcraft, Terraria, Neon White, and Overwatch. I also love to play Magic: The Gathering, and am always looking to get someone to finally play some Lancer with me. :)

Thanks for checking out my website! If you'd like to get in contact with me, check out my socials above.

Sunrise City is a social impact board game that I worked on in 2023. My primary role was systems design.

As a systems designer, I assisted the lead designer with implementing and balancing the game's money, disaster, and role systems. I was additionally responsible for conducting the majority of the game's playtests. I gained a lot of experience with identifying key pain points in the gameplay experience from player feedback; as most of our playtests were run in-person, I also had a lot of opportunities to spend time watching gameplay and learning how to take notes on important moments in play to later iterate game balance.

One of my most important contributions to Sunrise City came in the form of developing the role system. One critical playtest saw players electing to roleplay as their designated councilpeople; after their playthrough, I worked with the players to learn how choosing to play that way affected their experience. This highlighted roleplay as the missing key element for our game, as it helped players feel more connected and passionate about the social impact goals behind Sunrise City. This enabled us to create roles like the activist, and the capitalist, who gained their own personal goals to complete alongside trying to ensure the city would survive oncoming disaster.

In The Light is my MFA thesis project. This project seeks to achieve goals I wanted to complete before receiving my degree:

1. 1. Getting practice with level design, and in particular learning to take a level from its concept to a full, complete, and enjoyable game space
2. 2. Building out a game with a core loop that is more complex than anything I've tried to make before, and designing gameplay that challenges my current programming level
3. 3. And getting experience with audio editing and design

To these ends, In The Light was originally conceptualized as a puzzle game that leveraged light and shadow in some manner to enable the player to warp their game space. Over the last year, this project has evolved into a horror puzzle game that utilizes portals to create gateways between timelines. Players take control of the main character, Cassidy, and guide her through a brief 15-20 minute experience in Cassidy's abandoned childhood home, collecting cassette tapes that enable the player to learn about the events that took place there.

This project is still in development, and was recently exhibited at the Midwestern Game Developer's Conference!

Shader Museum is one of the final game projects I completed in my undergraduate at UC Davis--produced in Unity, this project was a chance for me to learn shader development using ShaderGraph. This project was also my first time making something for other developers to use, which was its own unique challenge! Through this project, I learned some of the concepts behind graphics programming and really started to learn how to implement unique graphic styles. Though these skills were learned in Unity, I've still found the basis behind this project's work to be invaluable as I've taken up Unreal 5 and started building projects there.

Additionally, this project remains one of my most popular on Itch.io, and is still something I'm quite proud of!