David J. Petika

Evil Dead 2’s Official Escape room by Hourglass escapes is an officially licensed escape room. I worked as a puzzle designer.

Arbor in Mensa is an experimental personal project of mine, made in Unity. I wanted to replicate the Zen experience of gardening through a video game. The tree uses procedural generation to grow up and out, while the player must prune the tree to lead it into the direction of the goal. I also used this project as an opportunity to make some fun shaders.

Please Don’t Leave was a semester long project for a narrative design class I took. I wrote the story to be representative of how it feels to be in an abusive relationship. It can be difficult to gain perspective in an abusive relationship, and so I wanted to create a mechanic that would give the player that same feeling of disorientation. To that effect I created my own version of the portals from Portal by Valve industries. I used this mechanic to create illogical spaces that the player must navigate through.

Mars Ball was a game I showcased at PAX 2018. We were a team of 9 who had 8 months to create a game engine and game from scratch in C++. I was the team producer and tools programmer. We wanted to create a game that was accessible, replayable, and most importantly fun. To that effect the game is a symmetrical 2 player sports game with rules simple enough for anyone to understand. The play space changes after every goal to ensure replayability.

Path Finder was an AI demo that me and 2 other programmers worked on. The project’s focus was on integration of AI into UI. my task was to program the path finder AI and create the UI display of that AI. A board is randomly generated and the object for the player is simply to get from the start to the finish. The UI is there to lead the player in the direction of the objective (with different widgets revealing different levels of information).