About Me

Getting Started

I was born in Pennsylvania and moved to Boulder, Colorado when I was four. In high school I got into making mods for games like Stellar Frontier, Counter-Strike, and Morrowind on my own. I also joined the Boulder Open Space Junior Rangers, working outdoors on the trails I grew up on. After graduating, I studied Applied Computing Technology at Colorado State University, interned at Colorado Research Associates working on atmospheric modeling, and worked as a CRM developer for the College of Business. Around that time, I started building games with a group of friends, and in 2007 we released our first game together, Electropy, and founded Team Phobic.

Team Phobic

In 2008 I moved back to Boulder and kept building games with Team Phobic. Our first mobile game was iTD, released right as the App Store launched. Our real breakout came with Bounce On, which went on to pass 10 million downloads, and I joined Team Phobic full-time in 2009. We followed it with several more games, including Bounce On 2, GravBot, and Tunnel Shoot, and in 2011 we partnered with Backflip Studios on DragonVale, which became the #1 grossing app on the App Store. We also made Glare, and by 2014 Team Phobic wound down as I moved over to Backflip Studios full-time.

Backflip Studios

Hasbro had already acquired Backflip by the time I joined full-time, and I got to learn what it meant to work inside a company that size. In 2015 I was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 for Games for my work on DragonVale, and I went on to lead the team developing DragonVale World.

Seattle

After Backflip, I spent a few months traveling through Europe, then moved to Seattle to work on Nibblity, an augmented reality pet simulator, at Leaftail Labs. It was an ambitious idea that ran into a hard problem: COVID hit right as we needed people out in the world for the AR features to work. From there I worked on Taco: Hamster Hero at Global Outlier Games, where I also started digging into how AI could be used in game development, an interest that's stuck with me since.

Now

These days I run Wizard Workshop, my own studio for game development and AI experimentation. I got the chance to teach game development at the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder, and around the same time started volunteering at the Longmont Humane Society because I loved working with the cats and wanted to help my community. A few months in, I applied to join their staff caring for the cats full-time, and I'm still there today. This fall I'll be teaching at ATLAS again, alongside it.