I work with games as a craft.
In practice that means building concretely and slowly — one mechanic, one room, one material at a time — and letting what is actually felt when playing decide the next step. The document is not the work. What runs is the work.
I work across engines — Unity and Unreal Engine — and across platforms with very different constraints, from Android to Meta Quest. That is deliberate. Tools change faster than an understanding of form, space, and timing does, and an engine is chosen for the task rather than worn as an identity. Moving between them forces the distinction between what is real knowledge and what is only habit.
Underneath this sits an academic background in art and culture, and two years at a practical art school — theory and hand, in the order that actually sticks. There I worked with the classical language of proportion, silhouette, materiality, and light, and with a way of working that requires answering to the resistance in the material.
Much of this applies directly to games, but is rarely used deliberately. A room is read by a player the way a painting is read by a viewer: through silhouette, value contrast, and where the eye is allowed to rest. That is not a metaphor — it is the same instruments, used on a surface that moves.
In VR this becomes literal. On Quest, a player meets objects at actual scale and reads weight, material, and distance with the body. The questions craft has always asked — how heavy does this look, how does light sit on the surface, what is this made of — stop being pure aesthetics and become something a player navigates by.
That makes the relationship to procedural methods interesting rather than a contradiction. Procedural generation is not an opposite of craft — it is a tool, on the same footing as a stencil, a template, or a lathe: ways of producing what repeats, so the hand can be used where it matters. The question I work with is where in the production the hand should sit — what can be generated, and what has to be built individually because it carries the experience.
Method
Material first. I begin with what is meant to be felt — the movement, the space, the resistance — and build the systems around it. Systems developed before anyone knows what they need to carry rarely turn out well.
Build to see. The prototype is not a preliminary stage of the work; it is how I think. An ugly version that runs says more than a clean plan that does not.
Craft where it counts, systems where it scales. Procedural tools take the repeating. What a player stops at — the entrance to a room, a turning point, a transition — is built by hand.
Composition as a tool. Light, silhouette, and value contrast decide where a player looks and walks. Handled deliberately, they are navigation as much as aesthetics.
The right tool for the task. Choosing an engine is a project decision, not a preference. I weigh platform requirements, performance budget, and what can actually be maintained.
Finished means resolved. A work is not finished when everything is in place, but when the parts stand in proportion to each other. That is a judgment, not a checklist.
Background
Academic studies in art and culture, and two years at a practical art school — [institution, year].
Engines: Unity, Unreal Engine. Platforms: PC, Android, Meta Quest.