Technical. Creative. Curious.
// I build things others don't see yet. █
Could I render my lofi ASCII game as high-def frames in real time? I took Thunderlizard — my procedurally-generated ASCII dinosaur survival game — and wired it through low-latency image models to render each frame as I played. The challenge was balancing model trade-offs between style, fine-tuning, composition control, and latency.
I led R&D at Mechanical Orchard and was the engineer the team turned to for big challenges. I taught AI to understand 50-year-old mainframe code by giving it a queryable graph of the legacy system's relationships and code, then built the agents that use that understanding to rewrite it in modern languages. The POC unlocked the company's $24M Series A. The full system delivered 10× improvements in speed, reliability, and accuracy.
“Consistently ahead of the agentic curve.”
I built Crossword Dungeon — a game where the crossword forms the dungeon layout, and solving a letter makes the surrounding rooms harder. Then I built a play-testing harness to let AI play it, catch bugs, validate features, and find new edge cases. I applied the same context-engineering practice I use at work to make it.
An atmospheric game where every location, visual, and game state impact is 100% AI-generated. I built a custom multimodal pipeline with fine-tuned models to keep the experience coherent across infinite content.
A single-screen, sci-fi, micro-metroidvania ASCII game with surprising depth. I wanted to explore how much I could pack into a minimal representation — striking visual fidelity at ASCII resolution, evolving mechanics that unfold across an hour with only a single screen, and an integral theme of uncovering the unknown.
“I absolutely loved this game. It's clever, it's atmospheric, it's surprising, and the graphics do things I've never seen done with ASCII art.”
Jeff is my guy for the heady problems.
// Curiosity is my through-line.
I went to film school and moved to LA to be a screenwriter. Instead, I ended up in tech. Early on, I was lucky to work with one of the devs of Quake, who showed me the art behind good game design. I was so inspired that I pivoted from film to narrative games. Meanwhile, I continued to build my career in software, which took me to Adobe, where I worked under Mark Hamburg, the creator of Photoshop.
My early narrative game work caught the attention of a dev at Latitude (the team behind AI Dungeon). We dove head-first into the early world of creative AI generation, building multimodal experiences in the GPT-3 era. I parlayed that new knowledge and enthusiasm into forging custom agentic systems at scale at Mechanical Orchard. I continue to experiment with bleeding-edge tech, finding new and creative ways to explore what is possible.