The UW-Madison x Respawn Entertainment game jam presented a one-week challenge under the theme "Symbiosis," inspiring me to draft and pitch the idea for Ape Axe Legend. As a team, we took my idea for a player being magnetically bonded with an axe and built on it to create a unique parkour experience. The game jam had many collaborative learning moments, as features and development were rapidly evolving over the duration of the week. I learned a great deal about the development process, including the importance of a clean level design pipeline and ensuring a solid difficulty curve that suits your intended audience. Our entry was a success, featuring the 3 levels, animation and sound logic, level progression, and movement mechanics that I developed using Godot's built-in tools. The following Summer, we decided to continue expanding the game due to our love of the project. We began with a fresh design document in Figma to broaden its scope, planning many more level features, new mechanics, and a much more structured development pipeline. The last milestone has been a new movement system in Unity.

My mobile development class tasked us to form groups and create a mobile app of our choosing over the course of the semester. I took that opportunity to propose Rollio, a gyroscope-controlled mobile game inspired by the classic Labyrinth maze tilt puzzles. My group will be taking this idea and wrapping it in a clean UI to produce a fun and challenging mobile gaming experience. This class project has been an opportunity to learn tools and practices for mobile development, and also a chance to test the understanding of project scope I have gained through my time in college. In its current state, I have developed fun and functional tilt mechanics using Unity's physics tools, an expandable tile map using Unity's tile system, and some basic UI logic for bug testing. 

A development club was looking for game pitches that loosely paralleled the process of finding work in the game industry. Excited for the opportunity, I pitched an idea for a boss rush that fit the theme, and the club decided to go with it. In the first semester, I documented a gameplay loop and the core mechanics, as well as designing and storyboarding a potential boss fight. When the second semester came around, I took on a club leadership position, stepping back from my previous design role to coordinate design discussion and collaboration between club members. Working with the club taught me how to collaborate in large groups and foster healthy discussion. It also provided me with some design documentation experience. 

Inspired by the diverse combat design potential of Overwatch, I document and organise potential designs and balance changes for heroes and game modes based on personal experience, research, and theory. I want to see the game reach its full potential, offering such a wide diversity of hero kits that anyone can find a character that fits them, while still maintaining balanced competition. The document embedded next to this entry is a compilation of my writing, and many of the gameplay ideas get implemented in the official game one way or another. Currently, it primarily consists of tank reworks and balancing, as that is my favorite role and I play at the top 500 level. It is currently missing many of my old write-ups, as I attempt to find and format them for documentation. I plan to add my previous game mode reworks, support reworks, 5v5 tank reworks and eventually start to write out some support hero changes.

As suggested by my bio, I am also a big fan of nature. Seeing the vast differences between environments and trying to figure out how they can exist is so inspirational. Naturally, this makes me a big fan of video games that involve biome-like environments. Though there are many games like this, none stand out quite like Minecraft. I love the biome system Minecraft uses, and I think it has a lot of potential for exciting exploration. To try and explore this potential, I often write up biome changes to help differentiate all of the biomes even more than they already are. I write about terrain, trees, plants, mobs and structures, and sometimes totally unique mechanics. The image next to this entry is a peek at some of my writing. Eventually, I'll compile it into a doc like the Overwatch updates.

Alongside my degree in Computer Science, I am getting a Certificate in General Business. I have learned the basics of business law, marketing, management, finance, and accounting. This general understanding can be very valuable, since professional game development is a business at its core.