Indie Game Development
While much of my work at Geopogo involves using Unity for architectural visualization, I also apply my skills to indie game development, using Unity and other engines to create gameplay experiences. My design philosophy focuses on refining and highlighting core mechanics, resulting in minimalist games centered on polished, singular gameplay loops that offer both depth and replayability.
Delta Vee
Unity Engine
Built for the Ludum Dare 40 game jam under the theme "the more you have the worse it is", Delta Vee tasks the player with maneuvering in a zero-friction environment, using the mouse to direct thrust and quick boosts of force, collecting stars and avoiding the missiles that emerge for each point claimed. I wanted to create an extremely simple game that helps teach a sense of inertia and motion in a frictionless environment. This understanding could form the basis of further understandings of maneuvering in microgravity, or orbital mechanics.
A Nightmare For Gluttons
GameMaker Studio
A simple, yet addicting browser game, A Nightmare For Gluttons can be compared to PacMan on a map entirely filled with pellets, no walls, and ghosts that don't chase you but just move around. However the difficulty quickly ramps up, as the ghosts will begin to multiply exponentially, clogging the entire screen. Half luck and half skill, this battle to collect as many pellets as possible and survive longest was one of my first games I ever made, and emphasized quick restarts and a short reward cycle.
POND
Physical Board Game
Pond is a three-player asymmetric educational board game designed to teach players about ecosystem balancing and trophic levels. Each player has their own abilities and style of playing, who while competing to consume each other and overpopulate will over time balance and create a sustainable ecosystem between the three of them. This balance mimics how populations of creatures in the wild balance each out, and with purposeful adjustments to the rules can be used to show how environmental changes can unbalance and collapse an ecosystem such as in eutrophication, the unstable populations of moose and wolves on Isle Royale, or what happened to Yellowstone National Park without wolves. Pond was developed in a small team of myself, Taylor Groeschen and Nick Hinton.
