Games

My involvement and engagement with games. These are, of course, a selection of the salient, and are not meant to be exhaustive.

Doing

CEO at Sonzai Labs
Metaversus: a Substack with >2000 subscribers on Game Design, Frontier Technologies x Gaming
Gaming focused Twitter: >55K followers

Did

Game Designer @ Limit Break, a Paradigm-backed Games company (200M fundraised)
Gaming Citadel Delphi Digital, Research, & Investment in blockchain game companies (Tatsumeeko, Spectarium, Jungle)
Wrote various thought leadership pieces / research articles on gaming (Sustainable Web3 Game Economies Is a Cursed Problem, Rise of Kingdoms: What Does It Feel Like To Be King?, STEPN Sprinting Away, Star Atlas – The Most Ambitious Blockchain Game, The Future of (Crypto) Gaming, not exhaustive)
Built voice games (Karaoke Quiz, @ Volley, YCW18, QuizLah at Hack&Roll 2021)
Trained speech-to-text wake-word detection models, using convolutional neural nets on spectrogram data, at GovTech Singapore
Speaker at various conferences, re: building web3 game economies / transitioning from web2 to web3 (Binance Blockchain Week, Google x Deconstructor of Fun Istanbul Gaming Event, Gam3r Forum @ UC Berkeley, 3XP @ Pasadena)
First gameplay engineer & game designer for a play-and-earn game, peaked at 4M ARR with 5,000 users
Awarded multiple prizes @ an ETHGlobal hackathon, for building an on-chain cyberpunk game (Best Gaming, Best Hack on Polygon, etc)
Economy design, web3 strategy & game design consulting & advising, for various established game companies moving into web3
Articles on game design (Among Us – A Game Designer's Perspective, Cat and Mouse Games: A Genre (Game Design))
Cyberpunk Twine Game Paranoid Android
Games in Unity (aPOPcalypse) Unity Certified (Unity Certified Game Developer)
Gitcoin Quests: Come to Consensus

Participated

Playing

✦A lot of games for research while working on Sonzai :)
✦Digimon World 2 PSX mods
✦Starcraft II
✦Rimworld
✦DotA 2
✦Diablo Immortal

Played

Open World

Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of Mordor

Card Games

Hearthstone, Duel Masters, Gods Unchained

Sandbox, Sims

Minecraft, Rimworld, Game Dev Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, The Sims (mobile, etc)

RTS

Starcraft II (peak: Master's League Terran/Protoss/Random in SEA and US server, current Master's 2v2), Starcraft: Brood War (Protoss, Terran), Age of Empires (and expansions), Command and Conquer, C&C Rivals, Stormgate, Deadlock

Tactics

XCOM 2, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Fire Emblem, XCOM: Chimera Squad, Into the Breach

Shooters

CS: GO, Valorant, Splitgate, Halo series, Call of Duty series, Helldivers 2

VR

Beat Saber, Pavlov, MotherGunShip, Population: One

4X and Grand Strategy

Stellaris, Crusader Kings II, Crusader Kings III, Civilization II, III, IV, V, VI, Old World

Not-so-grand Strategy

Chess, Checkers, Go

Action RPG

Diablo III, II (Path of Diablo), Diablo II: Resurrected, Diablo Immortal, Path of Exile

MMORPGs

MapleStory, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands (Mage), World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (led 25 man raids, GDKP and on) (Mage), Cataclysm (led 25 man raids) – (Hunter), Battle for Azeroth (Hunter), Monster & Me, Cabal Online, Guild Wars 2, Water Margin Online

Roguelites

FTL, Into the Breach, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Dead Cells, SNKRX, Hades, Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors

Tower Defense

Element Tower Defense, Sunken Defense, Desktop Tower Defense… etc (played hundreds of variations), Wintermaul TD, Legion TD, Heroic Origins Galaxy TD (most recently), etc etc

Idle Games

Tap Titans, Swarm Sim

Mobile

Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, Clash Royale, Mobile Legends, Archero, Everdale, Command and Conquer: Rivals, Rise of Kingdoms, Game of War, a lot of other games (for research @ Limit Break that I won't list :-)

Pet Raising

Digimon World, Digimon World 2, Insaniquarium series, Monster Rancher 1 & 2, Axie Infinity

Pokemon

Red, Yellow, Blue, Gold, Silver, Crystal, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, Fire Red, Leaf Green, Diamond, Pearl, Black, White, Sword, Mystery Dungeon series, Go, Unite, various ROM hacks

Countless more…