Game Development

[Current] Adroit Studios – University of Missouri

I am a current employee of Adroit Studios, located in Mizzou’s School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, where we make games for education! My primary project with Adroit at the moment is Mission HydroSci, a science fiction adventure in which students take the role of a space cadet marooned on an alien planet who must use their knowledge of water mechanics, scientific argumentation, and to solve puzzles. My work has been primarily environment art (3D terrains as well as modular structures0 and technical artistry; handling shaders, lighting, environmental effects, script-based animation systems, and graphics thread optimization.

Mission HydroSci is launched as of September 15th, 2026!

More info on Adroit can be found here!

[Work In Progress] “The First Chronicle”

A long-running work-in-progress which has mostly served as my testing grounds / personal sandbox since I started teaching myself game development with the Unity Engine in 2016. My goal is to recreate LEGO’s 2001 promotional flash game “Mata Nui: The Online Game” with new 3D environments, new features, and a new title: “Bionicle: The First Chronicle.” (It’s been 16 years since the grande finale, but I’m still a fan!)

The game runs entirely on features I custom-built myself, including a day/night cycle, transitions between scenes, interpolated fog volumes, and script-based animations, as well as systems for dialogue, inventory, story progression, and automated optimization. Most recently, I have been updating the project to the Universal Render Pipeline and using the new tools I have access to on enhancing the game’s visuals, giving it more vibrant skyboxes, clouds, water, lava, and more. I’ve also been creating all my 3D models myself using Blender!

“Your past is forgotten, and your future is an empty book. You must find your own destiny, my brave adventurer.”

Baking realtime lights into vertex colors

To optimize areas of The First Chronicle where I need dozens (or potentially hundreds) of lights on screen at once, I’ve created a system that takes information from realtime lights and converts it into the model’s vertex coloring alpha channel. Combine with a shader graph I’ve created that uses vertex alpha as colored emission which gets tapered out based on the material’s normal maps, and the result is a baked lighting system that requires no textures or material variants and affects normal maps convincingly!

UM Dept. of Communication – Research Assistant

For a large part of the Spring, Summer, and Fall 2021 semesters, I worked with the University of Missouri Department of Communications to develop a virtual reality simulation for a study they were conducting. The study aimed to gauge the effects of advertising and product placement- subtle and not-so-subtle- of vaping paraphernalia on the participants. I modeled, textured, and lit the environment, created the props to populate it, and programmed the majority of the simulation, which allows users to walk around a virtual mall and purchase items, occasionally receiving prompts to watch videos- some related to vaping, some not- on a virtual smartphone.

Other Art Work – Shaders, Environments, Lighting

I enjoy working on game artistry in my free time, experimenting with simulations and shaders especially. Below are some miscellaneous projects I have worked on.