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My current project. Elephant Game is a sorting game where you merge identical animals to create larger tiles, culminating with the prestigious elephant tile.

Taka Taka is a Japanese folklore rhythm game available on Steam. It was the first full title that I ever contributed to, and I'm incredibly proud of the whole team for pulling through on this one.

I wore several hats for this project.  

As the lead designer, I arranged all of the gameplay elements. 

I worked with the art team to design enemy types and define enemy movement mechanics. The game progresses through several zones. Each enemy is specifically designed to suit a given zone and is slowly introduced to the player as they progress through both a given song and a zone.

I created the core player mechanic. This mechanic was originally designed to suit the Global Game Jam 2022 theme of Duality.  The player simultaneously coordinates two playable characters between several lanes and must eliminate/dodge approaching enemies. My goal was to draft a concept that had strong visual clarity and was intuitive to pick up. To achieve this, I elected to center the whole game around color. Each playable character had a color theme. Red wants to slice red, and purple wants to bash purple. This made it easy for players to understand what the game is and how it is supposed to be played, but did not make it simple to execute—a sweet spot I always aim for.

Finally, I also scored and designed most of the beatmaps. Since Taka Taka is a rhythm game with a linear story, the goal was to create a series of beatmaps that naturally increase in difficulty. The game features four distinctly themed zones, each with three songs to play through. I designed each zone so that the difficulty would increase from the first song to the third. The pace of a given level was determined by the song's BPM. The first song of a new zone would always feature a low BPM, which gave players ample time to react to oncoming enemies. Within the duration of the song, I designed the beatmap so that the new enemy of the zone is slowly introduced. As a result, the first song of a zone should always be easy and approachable. The second song of a zone is a challenge song. The BPM is higher and typically includes a beatmap pattern theme within the confines of the song itself. The player is challenged at this point, but the level is more active, fun, and engaging. The final song was always the highest BPM song of the trio. At this point, the player is challenged to face all enemies encountered up to this point. Once a zone is complete, the difficulty soft resets as the player enters a new zone to face a new enemy. As a result, the difficulty curve of the game can be defined as an inclined zig-zag shape, where the difficulty peaks at the third song of a zone, but drops down a little when entering a new one.

I also implemented all user interfaces, including the HUD, main menu, and settings.

But this section is getting long, so I'll stop it here.

Jump Man was the very first game I ever made. I created the project for a college class in 2017.  At the time, I was new to game development and game programming in general, so I mostly followed a tutorial series on GameMaker to complete the project. 

The game was designed for an arcade box made by the San Jose State University Game Development Club. It was prominently featured at Silicon Valley Comic Con 2017 and San Jose Maker Faire 2017.

I created all of the art and animations for the game. While I don't claim to be an artist, I do still think the character is somewhat cute and decently well-made.

In retrospect, the game itself is visually crude, not very creative, is pretty unfair, and does not teach mechanics very well at all. However, I still like showing it off because it was my very first project, and includes a complete gameplay loop with full features, which—I think—is a testament to my endurance and tenacity. 

Dino Masher was an experiment focused on maximizing fun through "juice." It's a simple button-mashing game, where you aim for high scores. 

This was my first project picking up Unity Game Services to implement dynamic leaderboards and user-submitted usernames. I'm a firm believer that a good old-fashioned leaderboard can add some friendly competition and dramatically increase the replayability of any game. 

Dino Masher also has a character customization system, which saves all player preferences and loads them on a new runtime. 

Lastly, I learned how to utilize Unity's Cinemachines to create more dynamic camera angles. The goal was to have the camera imply an endpoint in the gameplay loop. As it pans increasingly closer to the player model,  a sense of spatial tension is felt by the player, which is only relieved when the loop is completed and the camera pans out. I created a simple game state machine that tracks what position the camera should be in during the game's runtime and tried to keep the camera as lively as possible to make an otherwise static game feel more alive.

Thread Ahead! was a game made for the 2021 College Game Jam and eventually published on the Android app store. I worked in a 6-member group and was responsible for implementing and designing the thread mechanic and enemy system.