Out of Element (2025) - GameMaker A few years ago, I made a little doodle of four fighting game characters with different elements. This quick sketch grew into a passion project as I started fleshing out the aesthetics and mechanics of this potential game. Early on, I realized that a combination of the fighting game and roguelike genres was perfect for these characters, and is relatively underexplored territory in video games. In Fall 2025, I was finally able to realize this project for one of my classes. I was the creative director and lead programmer; since we only had 2 months, I took the opportunity to hone my skills by programming most of the game from scratch in Gamemaker and leaving other aspects to my classmates. This version was heavily pared down from my design document, only sporting one of the four protagonists and one room, but it was an excellent way to learn new things about animation and character writing from a perspective of game design and programming. I also got to try out multiple different narrative structures in our playtests; in order to figure out a plot that fit with the game’s core concept, my team and I came up with multiple different narrative justifications for the mechanics, and then allowed players to explore each narrative as they played the demo: In Phoenix, the mayor of the protagonist’s city announces that the park at the city’s center is being uprooted and replaced with factories. In response, the Spirits of Nature blessed the protagonist with the regenerative flame of the Phoenix, hoping that she could eventually take the mayor down. In Family, the protagonist is the last in a long line of fire elementals who must abandon her dreams of a peaceful, solitary life when her father is kidnapped. In Fate, After being forced into a time loop by an ancient curse of generational violence, the protagonist fights to break the cycle of systemic harm surrounding her, figuratively and literally. Fate received the most positive reception, and was my personal favorite choice, so that’s the option I’ve followed through with as I’ve expanded on the character design and plot structure in my design doc. Early into the design of Out of Element, I recognized the reoccurring theme of a “Cycle of Violence.” “Cycles” and “Violence” taken separately are strongly resonant with countless aspects of the game’s design; Beat-em-ups and Roguelikes are games about violence and cycles, respectively, and each character has a specific fighting style and an element, giving them a relationship with cycles and violence in their aesthetic as well. The story I ended up following through with is also strongly connected to that theme; by taking tropes from revenge stories and flipping them on their head, I was left with an exploration of generational trauma, systemic inequality, and grief. That thematic depth is what’s motivated me to keep iterating on Out of Element far beyond the class project I led.

Tea Party(2026) - Godot I worked alongside a large team of game design students to make Tea Party, a Mario Party-inspired digital board game that strives to add more strategy and skill to the swing, luck-focused design that Mario Party leans towards. I did a little bit of minigame design and character concepts, but my main task was making sketch animations for the individual characters. We decided early on that the sprites were going to be cutesy and stylized, which was an interesting departure from my usual work, which trends more towards realism and “action hero” aesthetics. Despite that, soft, round shapes and chibi proportions are a joy to work with, and I was excited to take the techniques I’d learned for realistic humans and amplify them for cartooning. Procreate is my software of choice for any digital art project, but I moved to Procreate Dreams as the work got more complex; this was the perfect opportunity to experiment with the software’s unique animation features, which I quickly became acclimated to. There were a lot of redesigns from the artists, but it was always easy to recognize the overall vibe each character had despite the details still being up in the air It was a lot of fun to use different techniques for different characters, and I tried to find a balance between the uniform art style and the personalities of each one. Jasmine is stoic and no-nonsense, so I tried to use as few drawings as possible to convey each motion and move the art digitally to fill in the gaps. Oolong, on the other hand, is young and exuberant, so I hand-animated every frame. Matcha is a chill and easygoing character, so I tried to strike a balance between those two extremes, hand-animating some bits, while lengthening certain frames in other areas. Pu-Erh is more diligent and hard working, and his design has a lot of moving parts, so I ended up animating him similarly to Oolong. The main difference is just in how much overall motion is in the drawings–Oolong jumps around a lot, while Pu-Erh is more methodical and less exaggerated.

Wrathfinder (2024) - Blender/Procreate I have been playing table top role-playing games for genuinely half of my life, and playing Super Smash Bros. for almost as long. Designing custom movesets for my favorite D&D character was a minor passion project of mine during high school, but as I went into college, I realized that this idea could form an entire game. This idea has grown and transformed across my entire college career. My main focus was on making unique and interesting characters that blended resonant tropes with some interesting twists. I first designed twelve fighters for the twelve original D&D classes, but by making wholly distinct characters like this, my game didn’t utilize perhaps the most essential aspect of D&D: Customization. To solve both of these glaring issues, I ended up designing 3 new generic characters with a robust moveset customization system alongside the 12 original creations. This was an excellent exercise in exploring the different ways to bridge the massive gap between the Fighting Game and TTRPG genres. Whether you hone in on capturing a specific aesthetic, or take a class’s core mechanic and make it a prominent element of a character’s moveset, there are so many different ways to translate an archetypal warrior from turn-based pen and paper to real-time combat, which made for an incredibly diverse cast of characters. I also got to take my first steps into taking this idea from design docs to gameplay through learning blender, and seeing how I could make a character move around on screen.

Hundred Hands (2023) - Godot/Paper Tarot cards were a minor fascination of mine a few years back. I originally wanted to translate some of my beloved original characters to a 78-card deck, but I was slowly drawn towards making a tarot system of my own design. Greek mythology was a formative piece of my childhood, and so I devised a system based on those myths, including the name–The Hundred-Handed Ones are giants from Greek myths, and a personal favorite, so I set about creating a set of cards with one-hundred separate interpretations, each card featuring a hand somewhere in its art. As a way of avoiding cards that were too samey or niche, I realized that using their orientation was a perfect way to add additional density to this divination system. The cards are divided into three groups: There are 11 minor arcana for the numbers 0 through 5 as well as each individual finger on our hands. There are 11 middle arcana for hand symbols; they can be as ubiquitous as a fist or as specific as devil horns. There are 11 major arcana representing elements of Greek mythology—gods, titans, monsters and the like—that have symbolic weight beyond the other hands. When you shuffle the deck, the minor and middle arcana can be drawn in any of the four cardinal directions, altering their interpretation. So even though it’s only 22 cards, there are 88 readings to divine from them. Adding the major arcana to that, you have 99 hands in the deck–and one hand to play the cards. I originally began building this “game” in Godot, but I quickly realized that this idea would be perfect for some practice making physical games. It’s simple cardstock and pencils, but I still like the way they came out.