I'm a game designer with 7+ years of experience crafting systems and economies for games across all platforms, working directly with developers, artists, and stakeholders in small indie teams.
I take pride in my ability to apply UX and product principles to game design, using player psychology to shape behavior and make every design decision count toward tangible goals.
In this portfolio, I carefully describe my roles in my most relevant projects, as well as my approach to some tough design problems they presented.
For more information, get in touch!
Given its small marketing budget, Super Mombo Quest had to stand out and bring in players through its looks and feel.
To achieve that, I designed its gameplay, systems, and presentation to instantly communicate its identity as a chaotic, rewarding precision platformer.
In Mombo Combo Legacy, my goal was to design a more robust metagame and economy around the original's core loop to support monetization.
In the first month after soft-launch, D30 LTV was nearly ten times higher than the previous game's, reaching a competitive level within the genre.
To deliver the approachable precision platformer we advertised, I had to design a game with a tough core loop, and forgiving meta systems.
Through 500+ hours of guided playtesting and iteration, I was able to refine the design and achieve the experience the product promised.
While working on Adventure Llama, I refined the game's 100 levels using per-level drop-off data, smoothing the difficulty curve and keeping players engaged.
I also experimented with various adjustments to the gameplay and systems, further improving both short- and long-term retention.
As the senior designer on MCL, I created the core documentation defining design standards and workflows across disciplines.
I also wrote hundreds of actionable briefs for artists and developers, helping designs get implemented quickly and accurately.
Given its small marketing budget, Super Mombo Quest had to stand out and bring in players through its looks and feel.
To achieve that, I designed its gameplay, systems, and presentation to instantly communicate its identity as a chaotic, rewarding precision platformer.
Read moreI had planned on carefully refining my portfolio and online presence until April before making it available.
However, after learning about an opportunity at a company I have a strong personal connection with, I’ve decided to launch it in its current form.
Some videos are yet to be recorded and the written content is still being edited and proofread -- I appreciate your understanding!
RELEASED OCTOBER 2021
A flashy, chaotic precision platformer designed around its combo mechanic, made for PC and consoles and adapted for F2P Mobile.
For most of the project, I was the only game designer working on its systems, economy, gameplay, and narrative.
I was also responsible for product and UX design, owning the product vision, onboarding, user flows, playtesting, and more.
RELEASED OCTOBER 2021
RELEASED DECEMBER 2024
The sequel to Super Mombo Quest, this time made primarily targeting the F2P model on mobile.
As the most senior designer in the team, I designed a robust meta loop and economy to increase the lifetime value of a user by 9.6x compared to the previous title.
I also created and maintained documentation to help a now 10-person team execute designs quickly and accurately.
RELEASED DECEMBER 2024
RELEASED JUNE 2018
A hypercasual one-touch puzzle platformer, smaller in scope than the previous two titles.
Working directly with the studio's owner, I crafted nearly all of the game's levels, and refined its systems to increase engagement and drive monetization.
I closely monitored analytics data, weekly reviewing drop-off statistics per level and finetuning challenges to reduce churn.
RELEASED JUNE 2018
In November 2025, I’ve shipped my latest title, an action roguelite called Lia: Hacking Destiny, in which I designed primarily the game’s systems and narrative.
Besides the games I’ve made with Orube, I've also done three years’ worth of contract work for a company called Aiyra, designing and developing robust prototypes of advergames for third parties.
Before starting my career, I've spent four years making a complete game by myself, including programming, art, animation, sound, music, narrative, and QA -- giving me unique insight into the game development process from start to finish.
Below are 5 case studies, each describing how I accomplished a challenging design goal in the projects listed above.
These should give you a good grasp of my approach to game design.
Super Mombo Quest
Given its minimal marketing budget, our overarching goal with Super Mombo Quest was to create a title with instant appeal that would attract fresh players browsing their platform's storefront.
To achieve that, I knew we had to design something that stood out within a popular genre. After researching successful indie platformers and iterating on different approaches, I was able to come up with a solid vision for the game.
We positioned it as an approachable precision platformer built around a combo mechanic. A fun and rewarding take on the genre, which usually tends toward more punishing, gritty titles.
As the solo designer on the team, not only did I come up with that high-level vision, I was also the one to execute it, crafting the entire game around that core identity.
After designing the core loop, I applied UX principles to make the combo mechanic prominent and engaging, adding a combo bar that depletes quickly and creates urgency, plus loads of satisfying visual feedback as your combo progresses.
Throughout development, I ran 500+ hours of playtests, both live and recorded, asking players to think aloud throughout their first contact with the game, and refining it based on their experience.
In the end, this approach succeeded: The game reached 3.2M players, with 4.8★ on the Play Store and 96% positive ratings on Steam -- and reviews across platforms described it exactly according to our vision.
While other titles in the genre (such as Celeste and Super Meat Boy) were known for their punishing difficulty, we wanted to offer a more rewarding, forgiving version of that experience.
To communicate its identity, we needed three things to be readable at a glance: The friendly arcade atmosphere, the acrobatic movement, and the combo mechanic.
We achieved the atmosphere through the game's visuals, plus a variety of flashy, colorful effects, and a lot of feedback for every action.
As for the acrobatics, I gave the player simple moves that can be chained intuitively, resulting in movement that looks complex and powerful even though it's easy to achieve.
Now, communicating the combo mechanic at a glance was a challenge, and it took a lot of iteration and playtesting to achieve.
Read next ->
When we started playtesting SMQ, we hit a problem pretty early: over half of the players would ignore the combo and just move forward.
I realized we were fighting genre expectations. Usually the challenge in a platformer is simply getting from A to B, so players were doing that.
This was clearly a UX problem -- we needed to make the combo prominent and compelling, with indicators that'd be impossible to ignore.
My solution involved two main elements: First, a large combo bar that depletes quickly, staying in your peripheral vision and creating a sense of urgency.
Then, lots of satisfying visual feedback as you progress with the combo, culminating in a full-screen animation that briefly stops the game when it's achieved.
After these changes, every single new tester engaged with the combo: frantically moving toward the next target and often screaming when the bar got close to empty.
Read next ->
Since SMQ had a pretty unique vision, there weren't good matches to use as a reference.
To compensate for that, I advocated for constant playtesting, watching testers' first contact with the game and asking them to think aloud.
This allowed me to experiment and iterate quickly. For instance, we were once struggling with the combo bar depletion rate.
The bar wasn't dropping fast enough to encourage aggression, but speeding it up made players fail too often and get frustrated.
After some iteration, I arrived on an elegant solution: setting the combo bar on a curve, making it seem to deplete more sharply as it's fuller.
With that simple change, testers felt pressured by the bar dropping and re-filling quickly as they had momentum, but when they missed a target and it got closer to empty, it slowed down.
Hundreds of UX-oriented iterations like this added up throughout development, resulting in a polished experience reflected in the game's 96% positive, 4.8★ star rating.
While other titles in the genre (such as Celeste and Super Meat Boy) were known for their punishing difficulty, we wanted to offer a more rewarding, forgiving version of that experience.
To communicate its identity, we needed three things to be readable at a glance: The friendly arcade atmosphere, the acrobatic movement, and the combo mechanic.
We achieved the atmosphere through the game's visuals, plus a variety of flashy, colorful effects, and a lot of feedback for every action.
As for the acrobatics, I gave the player simple moves that can be chained intuitively, resulting in movement that looks complex and powerful even though it's easy to achieve.
Now, communicating the combo mechanic at a glance was a challenge, and it took a lot of iteration and playtesting to achieve.
Read next ->
Super Mombo Quest
The idea of an approachable, friendly precision platformer offered an interesting design challenge.
By definition, the genre has to require precision and skill from players, so its games are usually grueling, unforgiving experiences.
I addressed this conflict by dividing these two design goals between the gameplay and its supporting systems.
While movement is complex and levels are challenging, the systems compensate by offering ways to recover from mistakes, encouraging players to focus on moving fast rather than avoiding damage.
I achieved this primarily through the heart balloon mechanic, which gives mombo a second hitpoint that can be recovered quickly and repeatedly as long as you're playing aggressively.
Additionally, I designed the meta systems to make things easier for players that are struggling. I made it so the crystals you collected while trying and failing still counted, so less skilled players accumulated far more resources.
That way, the meta mechanics disproportionately favored those players, allowing them to quickly purchase most of the available upgrades, making their lives easier while more skilled players had to be strategic with their choices.
In earlier versions of the game, a lot of testers either played cautiously and lost the combo, or played aggressively and ended up dying.
Our goal was making an approachable precision platformer, so I had to make it more forgiving, while keeping the complex movement and level design.
I achieved this through the game's systems: First, you have the heart balloon, which protects mombo from dying once, and can be recovered by filling up the bar all the way.
That means you can get hit and recover it multiple times throughout the combo, as long as you keep your momentum.
Then you have the combo bar itself, which lowers quickly when you stand still but not when you get hit, and the respawn system, which lets you retry levels with little consequence.
These systems allowed even less skilled players to achieve the combo. Instead of worrying about not getting hit, they could focus on reaching the next target fast.
While the core systems were enough for nearly all of our testers to succeed in the first couple regions, a good 1/3 of them started struggling eventually.
I started working on the meta systems to address this, letting them buy upgrades to help.
But then, when skilled players bought those, it ruined the game for them, making it trivial to play.
The solution was pretty counter-intuitive: I adjusted systems so less skilled players accumulated a lot more resources.
It was a simple tweak: getting rid of crystal penalties for dying, and making you still gain them while replaying levels.
This was an invisible, non-intrusive way to help players who had to retry levels over and over.
Now that they naturally ended up with a lot more crystals, I made equipment and upgrades more expensive to compensate.
Struggling players could then purchase everything way sooner, while skilled ones had to strategize and be selective throughout the game.
In earlier versions of the game, a lot of testers either played cautiously and lost the combo, or played aggressively and ended up dying.
Our goal was making an approachable precision platformer, so I had to make it more forgiving, while keeping the complex movement and level design.
I achieved this through the game's systems: First, you have the heart balloon, which protects mombo from dying once, and can be recovered by filling up the bar all the way.
That means you can get hit and recover it multiple times throughout the combo, as long as you keep your momentum.
Then you have the combo bar itself, which lowers quickly when you stand still but not when you get hit, and the respawn system, which lets you retry levels with little consequence.
These systems allowed even less skilled players to achieve the combo. Instead of worrying about not getting hit, they could focus on reaching the next target fast.
Mombo Combo Legacy
Mombo Combo Legacy's predecessor quickly reached over a million players on mobile. However, revenue there was underwhelming, as it had few retention mechanics and relied on interstitials for monetization.
Seeing the potential, our team decided to develop a sequel - Mombo Combo Legacy - now planned as a F2P experience first and foremost.
My goal was to redesign a large portion of the original game to make it lucrative on mobile. I knew the sequel would need far more longevity, and enough new systems to drive monetization.
I started by creating a robust metagame around the old core loop, with a soft- and hard-currency economy. It featured powerups, cosmetics, a lives systems, and time-gated pet-hatching mechanics.
Then, on top of all that structure, I designed offers connecting these new resources to IAPs and rewarded ads, including a battle pass, special and limited-time offers, skin packages, a gem vault and more.
Once all the monetization systems were complete, I designed a spreadsheet with all the sinks and faucets in the game, and refined them to get good value out of value spenders, high spenders and non-spenders.
Since the game wasn't live yet, I fine-tuned economy balance through internal playtesting, recording gameplay simulating behavior of players in these three segments, then adjusting pacing and friction accordingly.
Althought I didn't have a chance to refine these systems using analytics, these changes were able to double D7 retention, quadruple D30, and increase LTV by 960%.
When it came to monetization, I noticed two issues with the previous title.
The first was players tended toward long, multi-hour sessions, finishing the game in a few days rather than making it become a habit.
And second was there simply weren't enough metagame mechanics and resources to design compelling offers around.
To address this in sequel, I started with the resources, creating powerups that helped with difficult levels, hard-to-obtain cosmetics that felt special, and equipable pets that affected the core gameplay.
Then I worked on retention, with a lives systems to spread out gamplay into smaller sessions and time-gated mechanics where users had to wait for pets to hatch, rest or level-up by themselves.
These change set the foundation for us to achieve the sequel's 2x higher D7 and 4x higher D30 retention, with beta testers at the time reporting weeks of gameplay and lots of involvement with the new metagame systems.
Once we had enough retention, metagame mechanics and desirable resources in the game, I needed to design the offers to turn that into revenue.
I thought about players as either non-paying, value spenders, and high spenders.
Non-paying players would have to spend the most time to progress, meaning they'd watch more interstitials and have more incentive to watch rewarded ads that saved them a few minutes of grinding.
For high spenders, I made sure you could use hard-currency to basically get any resource or skip any wait in the game, for prices that anchored the value of these purchases high.
For value-spenders, we'd have special offers combining loads of resources for a much lower cost, plus offline play and ad removal -- vastly improving their experience at a low cost and making it easy to purchase.
Once I designed the economy and offers to best monetize each of these segments, it was now a matter of testing and validating my approach.
Once the all the systems and features of the economy were designed, I needed to start optimizing it and balancing resource sinks and faucets.
This was challenging to do at this point in the project, since the game hadn't even been soft-launched yet.
We couldn't really experiement and measure results, and all the data we had was from surveys and chats with closed beta playtesters.
My solution was to go through extensive internal playtesting, with junior designers recording gameplay simulating the behavior of players from each segment.
I designed a spreadsheet cleanly listing every resource sink and faucet in the game, exporting the data in a simple dictionary format that could go directly into Unity.
I then used that sheet to refine the economy and iterate on it based on the experience of each kind of user, watching gameplay, making changes, and having them play again.
We eventually were able to soft-launch the game with the numbers I arrived on, and the LTV of a user was 9.6x higher than the original title's (both measured at D30).
When it came to monetization, I noticed two issues with the previous title.
The first was players tended toward long, multi-hour sessions, finishing the game in a few days rather than making it become a habit.
And second was there simply weren't enough metagame mechanics and resources to design compelling offers around.
To address this in sequel, I started with the resources, creating powerups that helped with difficult levels, hard-to-obtain cosmetics that felt special, and equipable pets that affected the core gameplay.
Then I worked on retention, with a lives systems to spread out gamplay into smaller sessions and time-gated mechanics where users had to wait for pets to hatch, rest or level-up by themselves.
These change set the foundation for us to achieve the sequel's 2x higher D7 and 4x higher D30 retention, with beta testers at the time reporting weeks of gameplay and lots of involvement with the new metagame systems.
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