Unity, Web

This project was meant for a game jam with Philadelphia Game Mechanics. The theme for the jam was "stargazing", and my idea was to create a kite-surfing game where instead of being tethered to a kite and catching wind, you would tether to stars floating above a nebula, moving the heading of your board and which star you were tethered to build momentum and catch shooting stars. Unfortunately I decided not to participate due to a loss in my family, but I've recently been moving forward with the game idea.

For this iteration of the project, I programmed a Perlin Noise generator, rendering the noise to a texture. Then, using a custom shader written with HLSL, I applied height and normal values corresponding to the noise. A volumetric effect for the surface using ray marching, trying to create a sort of stylized nebula. The placeholder "boat" here is meant to behave more like a wakeboard or bodyboard, so it has no problem going in reverse.

I'd like to continue this project by fleshing out the other game mechanics that I thought about when coming up with the original idea, like tethering to stars to accelerate. I'd also like to keep working on the shader model to include features like specular glitter and more comprehensive lighting calculations.

Unity, Web

This project stemmed from the Global Game Jam (2025), which had the theme "Bubble". My idea for my team's game was a word-matching game. I wanted the speech bubbles with words in them to have a bubbly quality, so I tried to implement a softbody model, bypassing Unity's physics system and opting to program all the collisions, forces, and solvers myself. The softbody implementation wasn't where I wanted it to be to include in the game, but I've continued to work on it.

A shader fakes a depth model for the 2D forms, passing in the coordinates of the vertices of each 2D mesh as an encoded texture. The shader calculates normals for each pixel and applies a MatCap texture.

My depth model and normal calculation is a little kludgy here (not accurate), so I'd like to give it another pass with some fresh ideas. I'd also like to redo the softbody implementation to utilize Unity's DOTS system, or using another platform, and finish up a version of our game with softbody interactions.

Unity, Web

I've been a big fan of the Super Monkey Ball series for a long time. When Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania came out in 2021, I saw a lot of discourse online that the physics and controls weren't as sastisfying as earlier games because the new game had been made in Unity, rather than an in-house game engine. I wanted to give a shot at recreating the main gameplay from the original games using Unity to see how close I could get.

As an exercise, I tried working from just observing the behavior of the games rather than searching out any source code. This approach also gave me the exuse to play lots of Super Monkey Ball. I think my version could use some extra easing functions, but I'm very satisfied with the result.

To feel right, the game needs to react to any level of input. At low velocity and extreme direction changes, this requires some nuance - otherwise the camera can get stuck flipping around wildly, creating a sort of "feedback" with the new velocity direction. Banana Mania seems to implement a dead zone to prevent player acceleration or "stage tilt" at low input levels, which can make fine movement frustrating.

8th Wall, WebXR

One of our prospective clients was a Philadelpiha pop artist looking to add interactive graphics to a physical sculpture. A goal of mine was to have the physical sculpture occlude the virtual graphics; many contemporary projects simply rendered all graphics overtop any real-world elements. At the time, Niantic's Lightship meshing and occlusion functionality was not production-ready, so I needed to figure out a solution.

Standard landmark recognition was used as a fallback to position an occlusion model in the virtual space to match the physical model. I also used an Empscripten port of Bullet physics for A-Frame to add rigidbodies and collisions, and rendered shadows onto the occulsion mesh. 8th Wall's light sampling functionality helped match colors to the real scene.

Three.js, GLSL

One of our prospective clients wanted to create and augmented reality filter that would have snow falling on a diarama. At the time I was pursuing training with Three.js to expand our capabilities with web graphics. I programmed this shader to simulate falling particles using curl noise.

Each particle's velocity is updated according to the curl of a vector given by the particle's position in a vector field.

Godot, Web

Emotion Explorer is a set of interactive children's books focused on emotional learning. As the staff game developer, I was tasked on creating page and dialaogue system and a set of configurable tools and minigames for playful interactions.

I provided iterative prototypes to a team of educator, researchers, and designers who planned game mechanics around the topics and story of each book.

Many shader-based effects were included, such as a dirty mirror that could be cleared with mouse or touch interaction, page flipping that dynamically deform the graphics on a given page, and special effects like rippling sound waves that refract and warp illustrations. A propriatary animation library was combined with Godot's built-in animation tools to integrate artists' illustrations and animations into each scene.

Unity, Oculus Quest

One of the later projects during my time with VRPlants, the Naturalist's Workshop experience was created as part of a collaboration with the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences. By making more interactive learning experiences with plant samples, many of which are stored to not risk damage by patrons, users could learn about the information naturalists glean from the collection and preservation of plant samples.

Optimizations using Unity's Lightweight Render Pipeline (predecessor to the Universal Render Pipeline) were key in optimizing interactive and environmental assets for the experience; techniques like normal map baking, texture atlasing, and batching and instancing strategies were also leveraged to run the experience at the standard framerate for Oculus Quest experiences. The project was deployed at the museum's 2019 Darwin Day celebration.