Splendid Strangers

Published: Apr 09, 2023

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Download the game through this link

Splendid Strangers is a short narrative game about the beauty of ordinary people and ordinary life, based on Leslie Jamison's 2019 essay "The Photographs That Made Me Feel Less Alone".The main objective of the game was to create a slow and introspective experience, where the player is invited to appreciate mundane yet beautiful moments.I programmed and designed the two "mini-games" and drew rough storyboards of the entire game to serve as a reference for the rest of the team.To look at all the storyboards click on the storyboard to the right.

• Return Home

Splendid Strangers

Heart & Mind

Published: Nov 16, 2024

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Play the game through this link

Heart & Mind is a narrative puzzle platformer, where the player takes control over a character's Heart and Mind, personified in the form of a cat and wolf.The game consists of two Heart and two Mind levels, with one final level where the player takes charge of both at the same time. Levels have dialogue and there are small cutscenes in between showcasing the main character's struggles in real life.During development, I was the go-to coder and level designer. As the lead programmer, I was also able to constantly change and improve the puzzle mechanics, the Mind's platform manipulation in particular, as I designed the levels.While designing the final level, constant playtesting was also extremely important. As the rest of the team sent me videos of them playing through the level, I made numerous changes according to what I saw in their gameplay, be it because I liked how one of them approached a particular problem, or because they found an unsatisfying and easy solution.

• Return Home

Splendid Strangers

The Circus Of Laughs

Published: Jan 29, 2024

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Download the game through this link

The Circus of Laughs is a visual novel where the player has to get through two mini-games to progress through the story.It was developed in under 48 hours for the 2024 Global Game Jam, in which it was nominated for Best Overall Game at the New York University Jam Site.The main gimmick of the game is that the player must audibly laugh while playing the two mini-games, which were designed and programmed by me, to survive, which I implemented using the Hugging Face Unity API.

• Return Home

Splendid Strangers

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

Published: Nov 01, 2024

Roles: Writer and Narrative Designer

• Play the game through this link

The Shadow Over Innsmouth is an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's novella of the same title, with a largely original plot, and 3 unique endings.I reread the story at the beginning of the development process, during which I took notes about the characters, setting, language, and verbs, as well as verbs that I felt could work interestingly in the context of the setting but weren't present in the original, such as prayer.While writing the game I paid special attention to tone and mood, creating an uneasy feeling in the player through the environment and small uses of visual effects in the text. I also utilized background variables to keep track of the player's choices, such as how often the player followed the rules and traditions of the town.

• Return Home

Splendid

Radish Boy Commits Insider Trading

Finalized: Dec 20, 2023

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Download the game through this link

A fanmade sequel/homage to Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (2020). Radish Boy is a 2D adventure game featuring the watermelon, sword, watering can, and bomb of the original, with the inclusion of the gun mechanic.The biggest question we had while developing the game was how could we make the gun an interesting puzzle-solving tool, and not just a weapon for combat. The answer to this was in the interactions that it could have with other systems. It takes 3 bullets for the grown watermelon to break, and non-breaking shots push the watermelon along the floor, and if a bomb has been watered, a bullet will make it explode. Both of these unique interactions are essential pieces to the puzzles that we then designed as a team for the game.

• Return Home

Splendid Strangers

That Time I got Reincarnated and Cursed My School

Published: Feb 19, 2023

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Download the game through this link

A visual novel beat 'em up game developed in a week for the 2023 Brackeys Game Jam.The player must make their way through five floors of possessed classmates to reach the school roof, fight their best friend (the game's final boss), and confess to the love interest.I was the sole programmer for this project and designed the combat system and final boss.

• Return Home

Splendid Strangers

A Snowy Day

Finalized: Sept 27, 2024

Roles: Writer and Narrative Designer

• Play the game through this link

A Snowy Day is a short and cozy narrative game prototype made as a solo dev in Twine, where the player experiences a day off in a snowstorm alone at home, free to do whatever they want.The game was made in under a week for a game development class, with the main objective being to create an experience that was cozy and humorous, but not satirical or wacky.The consists of the morning routine and the 10 choices that the player has on what to do during the day. Depending on what they choose, they will get a different ending message reminiscing on the day.

• Return Home

Splendid Strangers

Crazy Boarding

Finalized: Oct 04, 2024

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Download the game through this link

Crazy Boarding is a high-score based snowboarding game prototype, where the player controls a character using a bottle cap as a snowboard.To get points, the player must do flips and turns in the air, with full turns and flips counting for more points, and get to the finish line as quickly as possible. Once the player reaches the finish line they are presented with an ending screen, breaking down their score.The game was developed in under a week by myself for a game development class.

• Return Home

Cozy World

Published: Oct 03, 2023

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Play the game through this link

Cozy World is a simulation game developed in under 72 hours for the Ludum Dare 54 Game Jam.The game offers a relaxing experience where the player can place different kinds of seeds and bugs in a light bulb terrarium and see how the ecosystem develops as plants grow, die, and produce their own seeds.The game also features a soundtrack where different instruments come in as different kinds of seeds are planted, and switch from a day to a night version, and back to a day version, as time goes by.I contributed to the design of the game and was one of two programmers on the team.

• Return Home

Splendid Strangers

Grand Central Run

Finalized: May 02, 2024

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Download the game through this link

Grand Central Run is a high-score based game where the the player must run to catch their train starting from several different starting spots in the station, with every successive train they catch making the trains' speed quicker and quicker.The game was developed over the course of a handful of months, initially as a solo dev before getting help for texturing and modeling. It was made using Unreal Engine 5, and I was responsible for all of the code and design.

• Return Home

Sarmale

Published: December 16, 2024

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Play the game through this link

Sarmale is a short narrative cooking game about the player character's refusal to come out as gay to their grandmother, in fear of the reaction that it could receive, and the damage it could have on their relationship. The game consists of five small cooking minigames during which the player has a conversation with their grandmother, with her Romanian being translated into English.My main responsibility was the dialogue system and to make it work hand-in-hand with the cooking minigames. I did some quick experimentation with some dialogue plug-ins for Unity before creating a system from scratch, using a script to interpret what to do from a CSV file. I then created a guide sheet using some of the early dialogue the writer had made, along with explanations for how the system worked, so they could then use it themselves. We found CSV files very unreliable in some ways, but after some concessions on complexity, the resulting system did exactly what we needed it to.Click on the Dialogue Sheet to get a better look!

• Return Home

Splendid Strangers

DJriving

Published: December 11, 2024

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Download the game through this link

DJriving is a 3D racing game with synthwave aesthetics and a breakcore soundtrack. The player must use the car's drifting and boost capabilities to achieve as good a time as possible as the music responds to the player's racing.I was part of a team of 4 and was the main programmer for the project while contributing to the design, with the drift mechanic in particular being something I spent a lot of time iterating on to achieve as good a game feel as possible.We spent a lot of time as a team iterating on different ideas for movement and audio interaction with the controls. We landed on a set-up that is relatively similar to traditional racing games, but still encourages heavy use of the drift mechanic to achieve as good a time as possible.

• Return Home

Splendid Strangers

Volt Games

Period: May2024 - Aug 2024

Role: Game Design Intern

• Link to letter of reccomendation

Over the course of three months I worked as a part of the Volt Games design team and contributed to multiple mobile games' design and testing.I was the lead level designer for multiple hypercasual mobile games (Flip Cubes!, Serve Away!) some of which were not released, and also designed tutorials for them.I worked on two mobile sports games, one of which has not been released yet, and the other has an early build available for testing. I contributed to gameplay design, the design of the leaderboard system, game progression, First-Time user experience, and U.I.Click on the U.I. wireframe and Design Doc to see more.

• Return Home

_Splendid

Heart and Mind

Published: May 15, 2025

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Play the game through this link

Heart and Mind is a narrative puzzle platformer, where the player takes control over a character's Heart and Mind, personified in the form of a cat and wolf. This is a reinterpretation of the original Heart & Mind, where I worked with a smaller team and on a smaller time scale.I served as one of the lead programmers and level designers in the project, but also assisted with production, and contributed to other areas of design. The game has a 3 act structure, with levels in which the player plays as both characters simultaneously, and some where they only have access to one of them.

,

I was responsible for the level design for the Mind sections, which focus exclusively on puzzle solving over platforming challenges, and the latter half of Act 3, the hardest levels to complete for the player, where they need to use both the Mind's puzzle solving and the Heart's platforming in quick succession.Both sets of rooms were initially sketched out in-engine with basic blocks, starting with an initial concept, such as having to catch blocks mid-fall and pushing up light blocks when they are on the character's head head, and then developed with heavy playtesting.In the video on the left the player is forced to quickly alternate between Heart and Mind in a speed that they never hadn't been forced to before.

Coding and designing the movement for the characters was by far the most challenging part of development for me. Initially both Heart and Mind could move freely around the level (the second GIF is of Mind with an early version of its block moving ability), but even after settling on only Heart being able to move around, it was still a big challenge to get the right level of sensitivity, weight, and responsiveness for the game.In the end Heart was able to walk, jump, wall jump, wall slide, and has a dash that can break through grass walls, which recharges when the player lands back on the floor.

• Return Home

Total 11

Current Stage: In Early Development

Roles: Solo Developer

• No available build yet!

Total 11 is a footbal game with RPG relationship mechanics that is in still early in development. The player takes on the role a coach that is hired by a team in a fictional version of the English league, and the game takes place through the course of their season. The in-match gameplay is relatively similar to other soccer simulation games, taking inspiration from Pro Evolution Soccer 6 in particular, but will integrate with special skills and bonuses that can be gained in the out-of-match relationship mechanics, which take inspiration from the Fire Emblem Three Houses system. The game also takes inspiration from previous soccer RPGs, such as the Captain Tsubasa and Inazuma Eleven series.The main focus so far in development has been creating the in-match gameplay, with basic functionality for passing, shooting, and tackling being implemented, and player A.I. for both teammates and opponents being worked on at the time of writing this. Some work has also been done on creating the characters, the different fictional teams that populate the league, and writing the greater story as well as the smaller story arcs for the different character connections.

• Return Home

,

Dreamscape

Release Date: May, 2026

Roles: Designer and Programmer

• Play the game through this link (password: dream)

Dreamscape is a puzzle game being developed by myself with Mushroom Kosztolányi, Kimya Taheri, and Jingxing Xu. In the game the player must complete word puzzles to manipulate the different dreams they visit and uncover the dreamer's history.I am serving as one of the lead programmers and narrative designers in the project, but have also contributed to level design and system design, as well as some limited 3D modeling. The game can take from 2-3 hours to complete, was developed in under a year, was exhibited at GDC 2026, and is planned for a Steam release on May 2026 (wishlist us there!).

,

Dreamscape is a game about a young woman being trapped in her dreams, and despite the sense of control that her dreams give her over her anxiety, how she must learn to let go and accept the real world so she can wake back up.There was an initial narrative overview document in a Google Doc, but I later shaped the narrative work that we had done into a new document in Google Slides. The new document reworked the main character into a writer, more explicitly connecting her history to the main mechanic, changed details about the levels to better fit the character's history and the game's themes, and more.The first level in particular saw heavy revisions, changing from a museum that showcased items relevant to the character's past, to an exhibition and book tour interview in a library, making the connection to the story more explicit.

The main mechanic in Dreamscape are the word puzzles. The player can use their mouse to move around certain words in the sentence to form new meaning, which forces the dreams to change. I am entirely responsible for the dialogue system, which I created using Pixel Crusher's Unity Dialogue System as a base, primarily for the dialogue tree editing functionality.The system supports dynamically changing capital letters, "homophone words" that change from one word to another, and special "word bank" words that can be removed from their original sentences and inserted somehwere else.Developers can initially add new dialogue entries to the database, creating them as nodes in a dialogue tree. Then those dialogue entries can be accessed by objects in scenes with a Dialogue script, which can hold multiple different dialogue entires, alternate solutions for puzzles, and a method that is accessed when the puzzle is solved.

• Return Home

Level Design

I was in big part responsible for the development and design of Chapters 1, 2 and 5. In these 3 different levels I tried to challenge the player in different ways, introducing new mechanics and using old mechanics in ways they hadn't seen before.Chapter 1 serves in big part as an the introduction to the game. The mechanics are at its most basic here, asking the player to solve word puzzles at their own pace with no special words such as homophones and word bank words. The chapter also foreshadows all the following chapters in its dialogue and environment. You can read more about my design process and development of Chapter 1 by clicking here.Chapter 4 takes full advantage of the word bank mechanic, and slows down the pace by making the player try to figure out the meaning of words in a made up language through trial and error experimentation. The fun of the level emerges through unexpected combinations, such as accidentally turning your grandmother into a furry and making her dance. The magic lies in this being just as useful as it is humorous, as it points the player towards what the words they are using could mean, getting them closer to solving the puzzle.Chapter 5 takes all the mechanics and themes that were explored in the previous levels and puts the player to the test. In this level the player finds themself in a control tower overseeing the entire dream world, and being able to access 4 different small dreams, all of which are missing something. The player must use all of the mechanics they have learned up until now to grab the word bank words from different dreams and return them to their rightful place, before being sent to a final chamber where they must confront themselves and wake up from their slumber.

First Idea and First Iteration

Initially I began designing level 1 in conjunction with two people that were part of the original team. We spent a brainstorming session together thinking about different things that seemed "dreamlike" and that could be fun to portray in a game, and that could ideally blend well with our already established word puzzle mechanic.The main things that stuck out in our conversation were the idea of a museum with weird and silly items on display that the player character had some sort of connection to, and the thought of picking up a banana and being able to actually talk to someone on the phone with it.The first version of the level is an extremely direct product of this conversation. The player would walk into a museum full of silly pop culture references, where nothing except the ringing banana in the center had a glass case, and by talking to different guards, they would remove the banana's glass case and be able to pick up the phone and progress to the next level.

,

,

Early Improvements

Very early on we could already tell that there was a lot of growing room. The level served as an interesting enough (if a bit hard) introduction to the word puzzle mechanic, but beyond that simple satisfaction, and the sillyness of the banana phone, there was little else they were connecting to. We set to solve this issue in two main ways.The first one was to try to connect the level more strongly to the character backstory that we were developing. We did this by turning a lot of the items on display at the museum into objects that were of extreme relevance to the dreamer's life, such as her sister's teddy bear.On the other hand we also leaned even further into the syliness of dreams, but instead of having random silly items inserted into the environment, we incorporated surreal and dreamlike logic into humorous optional word puzzles. This led players to be much more excited about word puzzles, as they looked forward towards seeing what the results would be beyond what was purely useful for them.

,

,

From Museum to Library

It was at this point in the timeline that the two people who had been working with me on the level left the project, and I was left as the sole custodian of Chapter 1. This meant more work, but also that I had the opportunity to carry out a major overhaul in the level, and so I did just that, turning our museum into a library with a temporary exhibition.The main theme of this overhaul was taking what we succesfully implemented in the last revisions and making it part of the core experience of the chapter. Instead of the specific items on display being referencial to the character's backstory, the whole level was now a symbol of the dreamer's aspirations as a young writer, an exhibition in a library dedicated to her writing, followed up by a book tour style interview.Now every item that was on display could be interacted with. The ones necessary for progression were easier than the optional items, and every single one would have some sort of silly effect, while still being relevant to the character's backstory.

,

,

Final Tweaks

The new version of Chapter 1 was a big success in playtesting, which meant that it was time for me to mostly move on from it so I could help with other levels, lead the development of Chapter 4 and 5, and focus more on fixing bugs and implementing sound effects with our sound designer. However, there were still some small changes and additions to be made, such as small visual additions, and an addition of a secret side room.The most time-consuming change was moving the interview stage to the front and left of where the player enters the room, and moving all the other elements to the right. I noticed during playtest that the overwhelming majority of players just beelined to the items before talking to interviewer, which meant that they were solving puzzles without knowing whether there was any specific goal or objective that they had. While playtesting the tutorial, I had seen just how reliably players would talk to an NPC on the left before talking to the NPC on the right, and so I decided to try to apply that principal of left-to-right order to the positioning of the interviewer stage, and while being far from failproof, I did notice a considerable increase in the amount of players that talked to the interviewer before going towards the items.

• Return Home

,

,