Game Developer
I build mobile games and the backend systems that keep them running. My game has been live on both app stores for years, and I still ship its releases, read its analytics and answer its email.
I have spent eleven years as a software engineer, mostly writing backend APIs and automation in Python, with a computer science degree behind that. Six years ago I started teaching myself GameMaker on nights and weekends, and that turned into a studio and a game people pay for.
The part I care about is the whole loop: designing a system, building it, shipping it to real devices, then reading what players did with it and changing it. Most of the work below exists because a live product asked a question that guessing could not answer.
Live
A WW1 mobile RTS, live on iOS and Google Play
Soldiers, artillery and wind-affected shells fought across a trench line. I wrote the game and I operate it: store releases, analytics, live balance changes and the monetization model. It has been in players' hands and earning for years, which is a different discipline from shipping once.
Verified over a live relay
Two devices running the same battle, frame for frame
A standalone build of the battle simulation that plays 1v1 over a live relay by exchanging commands instead of state. That only works if both machines compute an identical result forever, so the whole simulation had to become deterministic: every random call rerouted through a seeded generator, then a checksum harness to prove the clients never drifted apart.
Concluded
How many units can GameMaker actually run?
A rig built to settle a question the team kept guessing at. The engine was never the constraint: 500 soldiers hold 60fps comfortably and 1,000 still run. The real ceiling was the game's own per-unit overhead, roughly three times what the bare engine charged, which turned a benchmark into two shippable fixes.
Prototype
The same battle, rendered in 2.5D
A port that replaces the flat battlefield with a 3D one and billboards the pixel-art troops on top of it, leaving the simulation completely untouched. Everything about how the game plays stays identical; only what the camera sees changes.
Near complete
Pulling a reusable engine out of a shipped game
Every object, script and room in the game classified as engine or game-specific, then the engine half lifted out as a template with placeholder art and an asset import tool. The hard part was the judgement call on each file, not the copying.
In development
A summoner defending a loot cache from heroes
A second game in development, built against a written design document and a modeled economy rather than by feel. Working the numbers on paper first surfaced a dozen code defects before a single balance pass was played.
Running
Apple and Google sales in one place
Pulls sales figures from both stores on a schedule, so revenue reporting does not depend on remembering to log into two consoles and reconcile them by hand.
Running
A million player events a day into BigQuery
Telemetry from the live game landing in BigQuery, where funnel, retention and drop-off questions get answered with SQL instead of guesses. Big enough that the export quota is a real design constraint.
Running
Play-testing the real build, not a test build
Drives a shipping Android build the way a player would: OS-level touch input in, screenshots out, with no test hooks compiled into the game. It catches the class of bug that only ever appears in a release build on a real device.
Running
Two thousand linked notes over one game project
A generator that walks the game project and writes a cross-linked note for every object, script, room and shader, so finding where something is implemented stops being a grep and starts being a graph. Hand-written notes survive regeneration.
Running
One house style, enforced at write time
A commit-time hook that checks every line of game code against a written standard and hands the violations back immediately. It holds the same whether a person or a generator produced the code, which is the case that used to slip through.
Shipped
A month of complaints as a spreadsheet
Pulls every low-rated store review into CSV, so player frustration can be read as a sortable list and grouped into themes instead of scrolled through one card at a time.
Shipped
An agent system that plans an event end to end
A multi-agent service that invents an event, finds and ranks a venue against a database and the live web, simulates the booking, then writes the marketing plan and copy for it. Every agent hands back a validated Pydantic model rather than loose text, and the run ends in a generated PDF report.
Shipped
The starting point for a bot that ships
An opinionated template for async Discord bots: project layout, Docker packaging and a Fly.io deploy already wired up, so a new bot starts at working-and-hosted instead of at an empty file. Picked up and used by other people.
If you are working on a game, a port, a publishing deal or a backend that needs an engineer who has shipped and operated one, I would like to hear about it.
Email me