This summer I began work on a VR tech demo that simulates backyard Firework creation and display. Since I don't own any VR tech myself, it made progress slow, but remains a passion I'd love to continue. Will update if I get my hands on some tech to continue. Work became very busy as well.

A few months ago, I was offered to work on a highly secret project at the time. I accepted, and it turned out to be the Nintendo Switch! Working on this technology has been a blast. Each week brings new struggles and script and bug anomalies that keep the project fresh. Although it leaves me with less time on my hands for side projects, it has been a lot of fun working on it.

This past week I picked up Unity again to learn something that I did not know how to do fluently: arrays. Specifically 2D matrix arrays. I'm thinking I'd like to pick back up my liquid simulation puzzle game to learn it. Can't wait to dive back into game dev!

At Kooapps, I was lucky to work on a bunch of different projects. Whether it was redesigning the levels and porting a tower defence title to Android, working on the economy and creating quests for a family sim game, or designing the sound for a casino app, I was kept very busy.

My two years with Kooapps is done, but my journey with Nintendo is just beginning. Since E3, I can announce the project I'm on! Mario Party Star Rush! Early June I got hired as a tester at Nintendo, and it has been great to work on IPs that I grew up with. I'm proud to be a part of the team and I'm sure I'll have many more stories going forward. I'd heard rough things about testing at Nintendo going in, but so far it seems unfounded! Working with good people on good products.

In my own time I've began working on an unannounced VR project I'm also excited about. Will spill more details as I continue developing it, but all I can say is the 4th of July is coming up, and it will be the perfect time for a little research.

Finally, I'm looking to revamp this website and make it mobile friendly as well as easier to navigate. My hands are full!

Save the Cave, a tower defense game I've been working on, was just soft launched on android! The CEO of my company did a write about about our journey on this game to get where we are now. You guys should totally check it out! We're still working full steam ahead on it, can't wait to polish it up for a worldwide release!

Just wanted to share this rollercoaster I finished in 2013. I spent a lot of time making it work in survival and having it be a cool player experience. Check it out! Also, if you ever want to join my server, head on over to my Minecraft server page and get the IP!

Coming up on one year at KooApps! It's been a wild year of learning the ins and outs of design and production for mobile games!

Got some useful feedback recently concerning spelling errors and inconsistencies across this website. Fixed!

I've been running "playtesting" my website for some time using Google Analytics. Turns out this site is horribly optimized, so I made the following changes:

• The site is now using GZIP compression to transfer data faster for the end-user. I looked up the pros/cons between GZIP and DEFLATE, and it looks like GZIP is more popular for a reason. It uses DEFLATE, but adds checksums to make sure everything is going as planned.

• My images are way more compressed than they used to be. Turns out Photoshop is pretty horrible at optimizing images, especially PNGs. I now use a combination of FILEminimizer for my jpegs, and PNGOUTWin for PNG files. Two excellent programs for reducing images 50-90% better than Photoshop.

•Leveraged my browser caching. Specifically for images/thumbnails. They now take a year to expire. Better for repeat visits!

I should probably minify my html and css, but I'll get to that later.

Also considering making a nice mobile version of the site. that will be a big undertaking.

Two new games added to the bush:

•Brown: An indoors and outdoors downhome multiplayer map for Half-Life Deathmatch.

•The Gorge: An outdoor map set in a gulch made for Unreal Tournament 3.

I've also added a handy FAQ to the résumé portion of this site for potential onlooking employers.

I've posted a short review focusing on the level design of The Chinese Room's loose sequel to the original Amnesia game.

I have retroactively added the Tasty Game Design Document that I wrote to the vault. I'm not sure how close we actually came to sticking to the plan...

New games added to the bush:

 •Protect the Papaya
 •Tasty
 •Water Power

Hyperlinks should now all look the same throughout the site.
Removed broken links in the bush.

 •Added a large section of developer notes on what I did in Tasty!

Dungeon Death's project page:
    • fixed broken navigation
    • fixed wrong download link
    • added extra info
    • redesigned the page

Tasty's project page:
    • Added workflow information
    • fixed incorrect thumbnails
    • added thumbnail descriptions

The Root of the Tree has been more appropriately named the 'Writing Vault'.

These games have their own webpage now:

  •Robert's Key Quest
  •Water Power
  •Water Power: Pocket!
  •High-Score Hero
  •Tasty: The Search For the Mending Blend

-Fixed broken links on games highlights page.
-Fixed broken links in the writing vault

Areas updated:

• New, completely code-based tabs replacing the image tabs. Now more flexible and faster to load.
• Larger text for games' "Made with / Genre / Role"
• Stripped excess body text for game description on front page
• Résumé download buttons
• Writing archive with proper tabbing!

Over the course of the past month, I've been hard at work giving Dark Tree Media a facelift!

New areas have been added such as:

• Current Projects (in development games)
• The Bush (catalog of projects I've worked on)
• The Root (game analyses)
• Chronicles (you are reading it RIGHT NOW!)

There is still much work to do, like filling in more projects to the Bush, adding more game analyses to the Root, and expanding on what I am doing with my current game project.