What kind of things do I enjoy making and playing?
Honestly, a lot of what I make is “I should try that” but what really drives me, at least lately, has been the concept of making a “toy” and building rules and goals from that. A seminal text for me from university was Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop which discusses designing for the player experience first, rather than a set of mechanics.
In general I am also a big fan of the “ludonarrative”, teaching via level design and environmental story telling. Anything that minimises the need for a large UI or endless blobs of text.
I am always looking to push my skills artistically and technically so that I can continue putting my ideas down without hitting any roadblocks. I work best in very small groups so to be able to wear many many hats is an absolute joy for me.
Released Games
Super Pinball Adventure - Dec 2025
“Super Pinball Adventure” was initially a toy I made for myself but saw high potential for it as a good timewaster on the Steam Deck. I focused on the game-feel quite a lot, as well how it felt to play on a controller with rumble feedback.
I learnt a lot about player expectations - each table in the game has a goal to achieve which is sort of a puzzle based on the name of the level and intentionally hidden from the player. There is an element of pleasant surprise from most players when they achieve the goal, but others remain somewhat confused.
A lot of time was spent making the SHOP portion of the game extra obvious - although the button was quite visible at the end of each level players needed an extra “call to action” to actually go there and spend their in-game coins. The game is quite difficult without actually upgrading stuff!
The scrolling background in each level was also something I decided was a “non-negotiable” - however some players were frustrated by its existence or got some kind of motion sickness from it so being able to turn it off was a must have.
I created every 3D asset myself in Blender (except the quite detailed goat skull) in an intentionally low-poly cartoon style utilising a distinct SNES-style colour palette. Texturing of the models is either done via shaders, vertex painting or simple pixel art images. The UI elements I cobbled together in Aseprite, combined with the lovely Daydream font.
The sound effects were mostly from Epidemic with a few tweaks made here and there in Audacity to suit my needs - for example added reverb and some EQing of the flippers.
The wonderful soundtrack was done by Philip Dexter and is also available on Steam.
The capsule art and trailer were done by the good folks at LOST & FOUND (Second Wind Group).
“A Mirror, Darkly” is a short horror/puzzle game about exploring a Victorian-era manor house with only a (presumably) haunted mirror. The player uses the mirror to find objects in the world or detect a difference from the image to reality.
The game itself was an entry to the Themed Horror Jam and came 2nd for creativity!
Most of the visual assets in the game were from a Victorian asset pack on the Unity asset store, with a lot of the audio from freesound.org
This project taught me that I do not enjoy creating “realistic” graphics with a first-person perspective. I spent a lot more time than I liked on optimisation and pushing visual fidelity and lighting to an acceptable level.
It was however the first project I “finished” so that’s something. I think there is potential here for a larger horror game but it possibly requires some more person-power!
Jam Entries and random prototypes
Visit my itch.io page!
Experiments and ongoing prototypes
Project Archipelago
Project “Archipelago” is an early prototype for an exploration / fishing game in which the player navigates a procedurally generated world in their small ship. I had a strong vision of a single isometric cube representing each square on the map, and players would encounter other enemy ships, rare loot, NPCs etc. similar to a classic roguelike or RPG. One early design goal has been to represent the fishing game purely through visual cues on the tile itself rather than with any UI elements.
A lot of the finer details have not been worked out, but I am seeing where it takes me!
A Home for Winter
“A Home For Winter” was intended as a typical cozy experience, where the player (a penguin-like thing) inhabits a forest and starts their own fishing empire! Narratively I wanted to explore the concept of a penguin who has to save money to bring their struggling family members to live with them and help them out rather than be stuck in the melting ice caps of Antarctica.
This provides an interesting set of choices for the player, who can choose to save money to bring family home, or use that money immediately for their own (perhaps selfish) needs. Bringing a family member home has the added benefit of extra help around the place, but this is something I would deliberately hide from the player and let them discover!
This prototype was VERY early on in development and something I dropped temporarily in favour of Project Archipelago. I enjoyed designing a fishing minigame so decided to double down on that aspect.
One thing I really enjoyed making in this prototype was the weather system - allowing for variations of snow, rain and fog.
About Me 👋
I started my foray into coding with my Bachelor of Computer Science, majoring in Games Development in 2014. Most of my time at university was spent delving into the details of C++ with OpenGL, being part of a team prototyping our own 2D sidescroller from scratch as well as the in’s and out’s of game design, prototyping and playtesting. Since then I’ve spent over a decade in the tech sector working in fullstack web development roles, utilising all sorts of languages on the backend from Groovy, Golang, Kotlin and Python, with the (now) classic combo of Typescript and React on the frontend.
In my downtime I enjoy spending time with my family, designing and developing 2D and 3D games in Unity, as well as 3D art, pixel art, composing weird music, playing guitar and piano and playing many many video games. I am a bit of a horror movie fan, with my favourites being The Conjuring, Insidious and … well mostly James Wan and Blumhouse!