Games & 3D 🎮

My approach to game development blends technical expertise, user psychology, and a deep understanding of immersive learning and engagement. I have 5 year experience in Unity, I led gameplay development at Arti.

Needle  is one of those 'wow' products, it allows for essentially any 'game-like' experience to exported from Unity to the Web - and it's actually useable and performant!

The 3D graphics on my home page are built in Needle, as well as everything on Toybox 3D Blog - Ideas Worth Toying With...

I really believe tools like Needle could transform website heros, product configurators and lead generation tools, if you have any projects in mind, get in touch!

My time at UCL Edtech Labs and Arti Languages deepened my passion for Serious Games—leveraging game mechanics to enhance learning, motivation, and retention. I saw firsthand how active recall, learning through failure, and feedback loops drive deeper engagement, making education more immersive and effective. This intersection of pedagogy, psychology, and game design continues to shape my approach to learning technology.

I strongly believe in a tools-first approach to game development, frankly, without great internal tooling, projects often grind to a halt later in development when the complexity catches up with you!

I'm fascinated by educational games... the trouble is, hardly any of them are good! Gamification is seen as the engine of success behind meteoric successes like Duolingo.

The reality is though, streaks, high scores and variable reinforcement schedules are the compulsive (worst) parts of games, not the actual fun!

Avoiding 'chocolate covered broccoli' in educational games was a big inspiration when designing Arti, a language learning game.

I always follow 'Constraint Driven Design' - this methodology first puts practical limits on what is achievable with the time, resources and skills available. This isn't a constraint on creativity, but is rather an acknowledgment of the complexity of game/level design. In reality once you set your constraints, you just have a smaller infinity in which to operate and clear constraints breed creative solutions and efficient tooling.

For example when designing the levels for Arti , a major constraint was our artistic and design resources, that forced as to adopt a grid based system and reuse and remix existing models. We also focused on creating internal tools that made laying out grid based levels really speedy.