Projects

Heartbreaker is a 2-player game where the other player is your vengeful alien ex.

Your divorce case is coming up soon and you've had the wonderful idea of writing a hit piece on your ex to swing public opinion in your favor. Unfortunately for you, they're trying to do the same.

To write this hit piece, you'll need to collect some dirt on them from the local aliens. Town is small, so word gets around fast—talk to people as quickly as you can.

Heartbreaker was made in 48 hours by 2 developers, 1 writer, and 1 illustrator (me!). Making a cast of quirky aliens to populate town was super fun, but my favorites ended up being the players' family, shown below.

Meet the dysfunctional Bloober family! Left to right: Zill, Zerica, Zlessing, Zustin.

My team couldn't come up with a game idea we liked until the jam was more than halfway over. Somehow this happens every time. Our first concept was a series of minigames that you play against your partner. Then we remembered our last game jam where we completely overscoped and weren't even able to complete a level, and scaled it down a bit.

We settled on just having you walk around and talk to people to collect evidence. That was pretty boring on its own, so we added emotions as a player feedback mechanism.

These icons were churned out on my friend's couch about 2 hours before the deadline 🙂

Emotions affect your evidence-gathering ability, and different people will give you different emotions. Talking to your friend makes you feel better than talking to, say, your ex's coworker.

Our goal was to make the player actually pay attention to who they choose to talk to.

The theme of this game jam was "Nah, I'd win," so yes, you can win this game. But is winning really the best resolution here? Play to the end and find out!

Roles: Design Lead, Illustration, Development

I led a team of 6 designers in creating a visual identity and web experience for TAMUhack 2026. Our goal was to help prospective hackers quickly understand the event and apply, while giving the experience a playful identity that felt distinctly TAMUhack and not like other hackathons.

I wanted the site to reward exploration without slowing down visitors who arrived for specific information or links. To achieve this, we used lightweight hover and scroll interactions to add personality while preserving a clear path to the date, location, and application.

I defined the interaction direction and implemented several scroll animations with GSAP. Animations supported the hierarchy of information by directing the user toward important content, like the application button or event location. We avoided motion that distracted from the content or served no clear purpose.

We iterated through multiple landing screen designs before eventually settling on the simplest one with the least visual clutter, so that the event information would be the first thing visitors saw.

Our second idea was to put the fruits in a crate and make them draggable with collision physics, but we decided that that interaction wasn't worth the heavy strain a physics engine would put on older devices.

For our navbar, I wanted to try something new after using a simpler navbar for the past 2 events. A teammate proposed turning the navigation into a postcard. I advocated for the interaction to expand on hover/keyboard focus for desktop and on tap for touch devices, keeping event information one interaction away across input methods.

I divided the site into sections assigned to different people, held recurring critiques, and maintained the shared visual direction across six designers. Because I also contributed to implementation, I could flag expensive interactions or scenes early and help the team adjust designs before handoff.

Mobile layouts were implemented after desktop, but because each section was designed with reusable components in mind, translating our layouts to mobile viewports was near-seamless.

We shipped the website in time for registration to 20K+ visitors and 500+ applications received in the first month. The project taught me to evaluate expressive interactions against their effect on hierarchy, performance, and input accessibility.

Asset Design

Learned the importance of making illustration-based components web-friendly.

Asset Design

My first game jam, first time using Godot, first time making a game, etc. Basically everything that could've went wrong, went wrong. We overestimated how much of our game we'd be able to build in 48 hours, despite mentors telling us that 3 unique, fleshed-out levels with different mechanics and assets was definitely outside of our scope.

Then we underestimated how long Godot export takes, so we didn't even submit our project in time.

Roles: Web Design, Brand Design