Hi!

This is my landing page for folks I've met in association with the Video Game industry. Caveat: I don't really want my name on this website for privacy, so if you wanted to see the games I made professionally*, you will have to DM me on discord or instagram or something. (Do include the context in your message.)

* Yes, I made video games while at a company. Not games you'd know, not a company you'd know. More on that below.

This initial section should cover at least one way we connected.

Where We May Have Met

Active Events (Game Events in Toronto calendar)

• Bonus Stage (Toronto)
• Torontaru (Toronto)
• Dirty Rectangles (Toronto)

Back in the Day

• EGLX
• MIGS
• GDC

What I might have mentioned

Talks I've given at Bonus Stage Toronto:

• My talk on writing 200 word TTRPG's
• My talk on How to Make Side Projects sustainably

Tabletop Role-Playing Games

I'm always talking about these, I'd be surprised if you didn't hear it from me in person.

• All the TTRPG's I've written
• TTRPG's I reference

Youtube Channels I'd Recommend

Wholehearted

• Gamemaker's Toolkit - example: Mark has some really good analyses on games that are fun and informative.
• Jacob Geller - example: The way he does video essays is really poetic. Not all of the videos are video games, but he's kind of inspirational for writing.
• DarylTalksGames - example: Extremely thoughtful game analyses. Into the third year of his annual backlog-tackling videos.
• Any Austin - example: Traces rivers and powerlines or rates undetailed places in video games. Calming and almost melancholic.

Either I don't watch them much or..

• Anna C Webster - A Brief History of Labor in the USA and What It Has to Do With the Modern Games Industry
• questmarker - A World Not Desperate to Explain Itself
• In the Games of Madness - On Mental Models, by a SOMA dev
• Arch - Historically, really good takes on balancing weapons creatively
• Adam Millard - The Architect of Games - Decent game design essays
• Freya Holmér - Literally everyone knows Freya
• Juniper Dev - Funny videos about games

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Get to know the dev

With the marketing out of the way, this should cover more details about my career I probably never got around to explaining.

What are your credentials?

Younger Days

From an extremely young age i was always fasinated by how things work and what the range of modifications they could support. This started as kitbashing junk to make little gizmos or taking apart electronics and getting the vibe behind them.

I've always wanted to be a scientist or inventor or anything that makes things.

• When I was in early elementary school, I would try to manipulate rules for games I didn't like (when I was playing with my little sister at least).
• One summer camp I did in like 2005, I learned the absolute basics of html.
• I did a summer Visual Basic camp, where I programmed Donkey Kong the first year and Mario Bros the second.
• In 2008, my parents got me some coding-lite software for generating websites, which I used to make a website for science class about physical vs chemical changes.
• I explicitly didn't take a programming course in high school, because I assumed it's simply not a thing I'd love
• I loved the Mario games so much, that I eventually joined the Super Mario Wiki and learned Markdown. From there, a friend I made there invited me to a different wiki that I later manged for like 6 years. That was the Game Ideas Wiki(a), back in 2010. I only wrote a few ideas but I got started concepting ideas formally because of it

College

Delightfully, Sheridan College offered a Game Design bachelor a little after I graduated high school.

• I finally took to programming. I did much of the programming for group projects and I made a bunch of games.
• There was a presentation by some kids in the grade below mine. They showed a game they made, I think about jumping between different platforms by drawing the right jump distance or something. I immediately thought 'If they can make something outrageously basic and get it on the Play Store, so could I.'
• I eventually did - spite can be a very good motivator. It gives you a target to beat, it can be a strong emotion to pull from,
• Made a dope point and click game because I wanted to take something way more serious than it deserved. It was fun and it felt like i had some real ownership in my education doing that.
• We made an ass capstone because we took lore too serious and paper design not enough.

Job 1 - Game Developer

After graduating college, I found work with a small Advertising tech company, who had a small game development division.

I was responsible for using their in-house system template (Unity, basic UI flow, save data structures, etc), and developing a mobile game every 10 business days.

Outside a small budget for assets, we had to do our own design, graphics, coding, music, and app store pages (SEO and more).

• My first game was like an infinite runner where you make a cue ball bounds billiard balls into pockets for points
• Another was a game about luring zombies with brains to run into a monster pit. I worked so hard with the character skins in the shop, being references to Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and more.
• One was like a scaling 2d dungeon fighter. Slimes/skeletons/bats/monsters would spawn, and you'd attack them. I spend hours making the damage scaling in the shop along with secondary boons you could equip
• One of my best was catching circles on a two-part color-coded pong paddle, with dynamic patterns, custom music and an extremely stylish vaporwave aethetic.
• One involved a dog digging up gravesites for a stage key while ghosts would scream at you.
• One was hand drawn game about a kraken that smashes boats into other boats before it gets rammed.

Job 2 - Software Engineer (current)

I still use Unity, this time for it's integration with a 3rd party multiplatform AR tool.

General

I "consulted" for two video game projects that cratered and I think while I was having a bunch of fun offering suggestions of guidence, my level of seriousness didn't match theirs.

What's you're deal these days

First off most of my work is spent on designing ttrpg's because they design and finish way faster than a video game

I have a couple physical/video game ideas I'm trying to cook

• I really wanted to make a vtuber headpat simulator (more of an incremental/idle game than a clicker) because of a vtuber I watched several years back
• I really want to rework the board game A Tale of Pirates because my sister HATES how random most of the missions are designed, and it feels like it fails to meaningfully explore its possibility space
• I want to make a sort of deck-builder ...thing where a big part involves the chaos of Golf With Your Friends with collision mode. Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and be given victory when you deserved failure. It's really about every way you can both build a Real plan and instead pick the lil shit option because its fun.

There's a few game concepts that I'm rolling around and might not build for a long while. This contrasts with the loose notes/scribbles/other docs that are cool but even rougher.

Most of my fun is in brainstorming tbh. Or designing. it's the process. often times the solving the puzzle and the physically completing the puzzle are too unrelated processes

I don't use AI websites/plugins because the process of making the thing is often way more satisfying than the thing itself? Like I painted a sunset where someone is ziplining and shooting the sun because I wanted to tackle that painting?

Design Takeaways

Who knows, maybe they're useful

School

• I did sprint weeks. When you start, it's easy to overestimate your programming skills
• the impersonation game, where the advice is "It might work but you'll have to work on it Fast if you're gonna". And it didn't work it broke immediately when we showed it off
• didn't work when I confidently told our sound guy to make robot music for our absolutely definitely robot game

Spare Time

Advice on How to Make Side Projects

• Write on cheap paper to make it feel less like you're making mistakes
• The more seriously I took the mobile game systems I designed professionally, the less flexible I was with the game design.
• we punched above our weight with do you fight the bear because we knew our collaborators and we had an idea going in
• made a jam with my work team and my knowledge was not sufficient to get the team to make something I thought I clearly defined