Hand to Hand Wizardry

Hand to Hand Wizardry is a single-player Dark Fantasy Boomer Shooter where you play as a Wizard who willingly sacrifices both of his hands to gain access to a dungeon where hands are treated as religious symbols. You will graft dead wizards’ hands onto your severed wrists to gain powerful spells that you use to traverse the dungeon, fight monstrous creatures, and discover the secrets that lie below the surface.

Level Design

As lead level designer on Hand to Hand Wizardry, I collaborated with 3D artist Zander Aguirre to design a modular kit that let us iterate on levels efficiently. Over the course of development, the team produced three complete A-Z block-outs containing more than 25 unique levels, with each round of feedback quickly integrated and retested. Because a boomer-shooter's feel depends so heavily on level design, this iterative process was essential to delivering a polished final game.

Encounter Design

Balancing combat encounters, difficulty progression, and pacing was critical to designing the game's levels. To support this process, I built data sheets for every weapon and enemy, then used that data to develop a Google Sheets combat simulator that estimated time-to-clear for each encounter and the player's expected health and potion count afterward.

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UI Programming

I partnered with UI artist Emma Jones to design the game's menus and player HUD, an iterative process where I served as the bridge between art and implementation, prototyping and refining each element until it felt right.

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Gameplay Programming

I scripted a range of environmental and interactive props that brought the world to life, letting players influence their surroundings by flipping levers, shooting buttons to reveal secrets, or riding floating platforms. These props also formed the basis for puzzles and added meaningful decision-making to encounter design.

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