stonkle

Hello! I'm Alex. I'm a senior at UW Madison studying Computer Science and Game Design. I've been playing games for as long as I can remember. It's always been something that I enjoy and can destress with. For me, making games is my way to share that same feeling with others.

For the games I play, I love games with deep lore like The Witcher, Baldur's Gate, or Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I also really like highly competitive games like Counter Strike 2 and Rocket League. Despite seeming pretty disparate, these games all have one thing in common: they all provide the player with a problem that doesn't have just one way to solve it. In Rocket League it's a very open ended solution to the problem of "put the ball in the goal with your car", whereas the story games have a bit more guidance in the problems. Regardless, this is a principle that is very important to me and one that I try to incorporate in my games. I believe that the best games let the player shape the way they play.

Something you'll notice when you play my games is that they all have a story of some sort. I come from a tabletop RPG background and have been playing Dungeons and Dragons and other similar games for a long time. My favorite part of TTRPGs is running them as a game master. I love telling stories and creating lore more than anything else. For me, creating games is just another way to tell stories, and it's something that I try to include in all of my games in some capacity. Another reason I always try to add some sort of story to my games is because I believe that immersion in games comes from context. I always try to contextualize the goal in my games, because I believe that is what makes players care about the goal more. There needs to be a reason why the problem needs to solved.

So, if there's anything you should take away from this rambling, it's that you should always expect some level of storytelling in my games, and there will always be multiple ways of solving the problem in the game.