Ethan Whiton

Vallicia in Ruin

Engine: FEBuilder

Date: March 2026 – April 2026

If you‘re interested in playing the level for yourself, just let me know!

Vallicia in Ruin is a single-chapter Fire Emblem ROM hack that puts you in the halls of Castle Vallicia as if finds itself under siege by King Armand of Staelholm. With nowhere else to turn, Queen Elisandre sends two of her knights rescue her children and flee the city. The map puts the player in the middle of this escape, and tasks them with making a break for the exit before they get overwhelmed and defeated. This chapter was designed for LEAF, the fourth installment of a series of month-long game jams held annally by the Fire Emblem ROM hacking community.

As the map is an escape map, it has to remain rather linear. Still, my biggest challenge was making sure that it still felt interesting, especially for different types of players. As a result, I implemented three different routes. The left side of the map is populated by a large number of enemies that are weaker in quality. The right side has less units of higher quality, balancing it out. The final route is the middle, characterized by very few enemies, but an extremely daunting defensive formation. However, breaking through can be made easier by taking a detour near the start of the map to pick up a strong weapon.

The map ended up getting a score of 43/80 and a placing of 7th/13th in the contest, which I am honestly very happy with. Not only was this my first level design contest ever, but I was pretty strapped for time for the duration of the month and wasn’t able to do things like external testing. Still, the judges gave me great feedback to reflect on, and I look forward to expanding this map and its story in the future.

Previous iterations of the map featuring: Chests, as well as a larger staircase area in the top left.
A raised pathway on the righthand side of the map.
An extra room on the left side of the map, where enemies would ambush you from.
And more chests, rather than enemies in the bottom corner rooms.
The finished map, with enemy placements.
Examples of the three main routes that can be taken through the map.

Return

Wandslinger’s Hamlet

Engine: Unreal Engine

Date: March 2024 – April 2024

Paragraph

Specimen 001

Engine: Godot

Date: September 2025 – January 2026

Specimen 001 is a physics-based puzzle platformer that sees a small extraterrestrial that has crash-landed onto Earth captured by a scientists and subjected to numerous puzzles. Using objects such as fans, springs, and crates, the Specimen must blow, launch, and push a ball around the level to complete the puzzle.

The purpose o this project was two-fold — to try making my first puzzle game, and to learn how to use Godot. The puzzle design was interesting as I had to not only constrain my ideas to a single screen, but also create a good difficulty progression using many different combinations of physics objects. However, I ended up finding out that I’m just not a good puzzle designer, even when they are environmental puzzles within my levels.

However, I also found out that I loved using Godot. I acclimated to the node-based structure of the engine rather quickly, and found GDScript to be a very easy coding language to pick up. In a way, it combined my favorite parts from both Unreal and Unity, creating a perfect middle ground. So while this project never saw completion, it did get me hooked on my new favorite engine, so I have it to thank for that.

Karma: The Six Realms

Position: Project Manager, Lead Designer

Engine: Unity

Date: June 2025 – August 2025

View the Game’s Website

Karma: The Six Realms is a pro-social game that focuses on the six realms of Buddhism. Using prosocial mechanics philosophies, the player would journey through these six realms and experience peoples’ issues differently in each, learning and honing skills like kindness and compassion in the process. I worked on Karma during a two-month internship period at The Verse.

As an onboarding process for the team, I worked on a one-week game jam based on one of the six realms of Buddhism. I decided to base my game around the Ghost realm, where beings called “Hungry Ghosts” are bound by insatiable greed, hungry, or yearning. I went with a simple game loop of talking to a ghost, finding an item that will satiate it, and bringing it back. This way the scope would be kept low for the time frame, by I could work on inventories and dialogue systems — two systems I hadn’t messed around with much.

Play My Game Jam Here

As for my work on the team proper, I ended up taking much more of a project management role. With the help of the team’s lead, I ran meetings twice a week and helped set tasks and goals for the group and individuals. Most of my time on the project was during the concepting phase, which meant that meetings mostly revolved around nailing down certain aspects of the game, such as story beats, gameplay mechanics, and art direction. Overall, it was a very good experience, and being able to hone my production skills helped a lot in the projects I worked on after, as I tended to act as my team’s scrum master.

“He combines strong technical expertise, thoughtful product vision, and genuine emotional intelligence. Ethan is an exceptional collaborator and a leader who makes every team he’s on better.”
Ben Simon-Thomas, Co-Founder of The Verse

Goblin 9-5

Position: Level Designer, Scrum Master

Engine: Unity

Date: January 2025 – May 2025

Goblin 9-5 is a co-op dungeon crawler game where two players control goblins on a dungeon’s clean-up crew. During the night, while adventurers are away, these goblins verture around the dungeon to refill and restock traps and treasure, while making sure not to trigger them themselves. This is done by throwing ammunition — and your coworker — to pass objects around the pits and walls of the dungeon. As the player progresses, they unlock more and more floors of the dungeon to work on, each with its own set of obstacles to overcome.

I think one of the most interesting aspects of Goblin 9-5‘s design was how radically it was shifted through tester feedback. Originally, there was going to be no direct interaction between players as a way to incentivize splitting up when necessary. But while taking the game to a weekly QA testing session, a tester simply said “Hey, it’d be cool if I could throw the other player.” Somehow, we hadn’t thought of this before. But that week we implemented it, and both ourselves and testers found the game significantly more enjoyable. And while it did provide a decent shift in scope and design philosophy, it was definitely for the better.

However, there were a lot of hiccups with the game’s development. Due to the nature of the class this game was made for, there was a lot of shifting of team members throughout the duration of the project (it happened at least three times). As such, a lot of time was spent onboarding new people while also dealing with shifting and clashing design philosophies. There were also some issues with implementation pipelines both with art and programming. The programming bottlenecks specifically were the biggest hurdle for me, as it meant that later on in the project, we were having everyone code anything they could, just to get the game functioning. This, along with the fact that I was never really properly aquainted with the codebase, meant that while most of my code worked, it clashed with other systems and was in general just very sloppy. To be candid, this caused a lot of problems for me mentally. I had never faced a situation like this before, and it caused a pretty huge bout of Impostor Syndrome over whether I was a good designer or not. In the end, however, it only motivated me to try harder. I took the following summer to reinforce the basics and start looking at Godot to help reinforce my object-orineted programming skills. And now being on the other end of that process, I can say for sure I learned a lot, and am a better developer because of it.

Collaborators

Design:

Programming:

Art:

Niji no Senshi ~ Warriors of the Rainbow

Engine: Lex Talionis

Date: June 2024 – June 2025

Niji no Senshi ~ Warriors of the Rainbow was a fan-game passion project of mine that combined two of my favorite franchises — Love Live! and Fire Emblem. Built in Lex Talionis, the same engine as Crypt of the Forgotten, I used the skills I learned from that project to start a large scale campaign with a full twenty-nine chapters (about the length of an average Fire Emblem title). Since the project was almost entirely spearheaded entirely by me, I also was in charge of the art, programming, and narrative aspects. However, naturally, I want to focus on the level design.

As a larger scale project that spanned across multiple chapters, the level design was much different than designing a single, standalone chapter. Now, I had to put an emphasis on drip-feeding the player power (new units, weapons and items, etc.), and balancing around item management and players potneitally not having certain tools at any part of the game. And since the game had a concrete narrative, being able to tie the map design into that narrative let expand the types of map objectives I could use, creating more fun maps. My personal favorites were Ch. 4 and Ch. 7, which both focused around rescuing NPC allies that were in danger, or the planned Ch. 9, which saw the player escaping from a stronger army after losing a large, last-stand type battle.

Unfortunately, I had to step away from the project for a multitude of reasons — burnout, other responsibilities, and just the scale of the project in general. Still, I learned a lot from the experience. For one, it reminded me of my limits as a solo developer. While design, programming, and narrative came easily to me, aspects of the process like art and music took a lot out of me, and were large roadblocks during development. Futhermore, it taught me a lot about the community surrounding a game, and finding a good playerbase. I drummed up support for the game on my social media, but quickly ran into the issue of actually distributing it. I originally chose Lex Talinos because the alternative of ROM hacking has… some legal issues when it comes to easy of distribution. But Lex Talionis also had similar problems regarding the necessary technology literacy to run the build, which made even outsourcing playtesting a bit of a chore, which was a large part of why I decided to stop development. Still, the game was a good experience, and I don’t regret giving it a shot. And who knows, maybe the project will see the light of day again. I’d like it to, at least.

Golfin

Position: Project Manager, Generalist Designer

Engine: Unity

Date: May 2024 – July 2024

Check the game out on:

Google Play

App Store

Golfin was a blockchain-centric golf game that sought to combine real-life golf courses with NFT technology to allow people to train their golfers as they played through a campaign and tournmanets. Additionally, thanks to GPS functionality, players would be able to gain rewards while the golf on the real courses the courses in the app were based off of. I worked on this project during a travel abroad opportunity to Kyoto, Japan, and… it was an interesting experience, to say the least.

As I said, Golfin was eveloped using NFTs and blockchain technology, two things I’m not particularly fond of. Beyond that, however, there were a lot of hurdles with how the game was being developed, primarily because the shareholders and higher-ups at the company were seemingly more focused on theoretically generating income, rather than making an actually good game. I think the mechanic that best symbolized this was their proposal to have characters — linked to NFTs, mind you — die of old age, leading players to have to buy more. Not only is this simply not how NFTs function, but I found it extremely predatory. As such, myself and the other intern I was working with spent several weeks designing and pitching systems that found a balance between engaging gameplay and monetization. We eventually landed on a system where characters would age, but still remain usable. Through aging they would learn skills, and you could pay to “prestige” back to a younger age bracket to get more skills, or stay there to influence your stats in different ways. While still monetizable, it left things a lot more up to the player, and didn’t lock people out of the game just because they’ve been playing for a while.

While I wouldn’t trade my time in Japan for the world, my time spent on Golfin definitely could have been better spent. Since, the company behind the game went under and since we weren’t able to keep any of our documentation, the game itself and this website are the only surviving records, for better or for worse. Still, having to deal with monetization and balance the needs of the game with those of shareholders were both very good experiences, and ones that could be useful in the future. I also got to meet a few really cool people and, of course, travel abroad in Japan. I could spend forever talking about how much that changed my life, but instead I’ll just leave you with a few of my favorite pictures from my time there.

Moai Mayhem

Position: Level Designer

Engine: Unity

Date: October 2023 – December 2023

Moai Mayhem is an educational exploration game esigned for 1^st – 3^rd graders with the aim of teaching them about the Moai statues found on the island of Rapa-Nui — more commonly known as Easter Island. By exploring the different areas of the island, players will learn about the statues’ history and presence on the island.

At its core, the level design of the game was rather simple, as it is designed for younger children. Still, I had to make sure key points in each level were spaced apart and flowed well together in order to make the gameplay feel good while also making sure the layouts and terrain were similar to the actual island of Rapa-Nui. I also had to keep all of this well-documented for the team, which was new for me as this was the first game I had worked on with a team of this size.

Not only was the experience of working on a educational game a very interesting and fulfilling one, but this project holds a special place on my heart because a lot of the people I worked on this project with ended up being teammates on later projects, such as Choo Choo Boom Boom. So make sure to check out their links below, since they’re an extremely talented and amazing bunch of people.

Collaborators

Designers:

Programmers:

Artists:

Sound Designer:

Repair Rush

Engine: Unity

Date: October 2023 – December 2023

Repair Rush is a competitive, one vs. one grid-based strategy game where players command armies of robots to capture properties and take down the other player’s army. While I had worked with strategy games in pre-existing engines before, this was my first time making one from scratch, which proved to be a big undertaking. Because of this, it challenged me in using some game development techniques that were pretty ahead of the curve of my college’s curriculum. The biggest one was Scriptable Objects, which I used for the two biggest parts of the game — units and tiles. While new to me. I was able to use them successfully, and eventually apply that learning again when using Resources in Godot for the first time.

While the project definitely shows its age, I am very proud of how it turned out, given how new at game development I was when I made it. In fact, the whole reason I made this “My Story” page was to highlight projects like this one — games that don’t fit well anywhere else in my portfolio, but I think are still worth reflecting on. After all, it’s impossible to know how far you’ve grown if you can’t remember where you were when you started.

File Download

Education

Bachelor of Science Degree In Game Design

Champlain College, Burlington, VT

GPA 4.0/4.0
President’s List

Skills

Hard Skills

Level Design
Unit Design and Balance
Systems Design
Game Prototyping
Documentation
QA Testing
Scrum Master

Tools & Software

Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot
C#, Unreal Visual Scripting, GDScript
Github, TortoiseSVN, Bitbucket, Fisheye
Confluence, Jira
Google Suite, Figma, Miro
Adobe Suite, Autodesk Maya

Work Experience

Project Manager/Game Designer, May 2025 – August 2025

The Verse, Berkeley, California (Remote)

Lead a diverse team to work on Karma: The Six Realms, a pro-social, narrative-driven game that aims to educate about the six Buddhist realms and promote health and wellbeing
Utilized documentation tools to concept and design game mechanics that are fun and engaging, while also promoting prosocial behaviors and learning
Organized and held weekly stand-ups to allow the team to share updates and give feedback in order to promote iterative design and properly plan for coming sprints

Project Manager/Game Designer, May 2024 – July 2024

Wonderwall, Kyoto, Japan

Collaborated with a team of designers and programmers to create and document systems to be implemented into a vertical slice
Implemented gameplay features in-engine to help prepare for in-house playtesting and prototype releases
Corresponded with shareholders the ensure that their vision for the game could be realized, while also creating a fun gameplay experience

Project Experience

Choo Choo Boom Boom, In-Scope Studio, Expected May 2026

Level Designer/Scrum Master

An on-rails shooter where you must use different types of cannons to navigate around the level, destroy obstacles, and defeat gigantic bosses
Create and implement a large-scale level that incorporates player agency and enjoyment, while also staying true to the on-rails genre
Lead weekly stand-up meetings and facilitate pinpointing sprint goals and creating weekly tasks

Prehistoric Pack, Bonepile Studios, Expected May 2026

Systems Designer

A dinosaur themed auto-battler where players open card packs to obtain the units that they can develop and use in battle
Implement unit abilities and other in=game features using Unreal Engine 5’s blueprint system
Propose and implement balance changes to ensure fun and balanced gameplay, while also promoting interesting synergies between units, their abilities, and in-game mechanics