JC Ryan
Game Programmer & Designer
I'm a passionate game designer and programmer building full-stack gameplay systems at Blankmode Games. I have 4+ years of experience building tools and game features in Unity.
Co-Founder / Lead Programmer, Designer - 2025
I spearheaded development on Jazz Vs Waffles, an AI-powered game where you can battle anything you can imagine. I brainstormed, iterated on, and implemented multiple generative-ai-enabled features in a scalable, cost-effective, and secure way for 50,000+ players during our beta. The game is released - play it now by clicking the image!
Solo Developer - 2024
The Robot on the Hill is my graduate Thesis project. It was inspired heavily by a games scholar named Arjoranta, games scholar Ian Bogost, and a philosopher named Byung-Chul Han. It's a rogue-like auto-battler which experimentally integrates psychological and existential themes. More is written about it in my thesis paper, and a playtestable demo can be downloaded by clicking the picture.
Mixed Roles
Itch.io is where I keep a backlog of different prototypes and experiments in design.
Solo Developer - 2023
A match-box RC car prototype for VR, utilizing Unity's ml-agents package to create self-driving cars. From a design perspective, this project was an investigation into 'the aesthetics of small things'.
Solo Developer - 2020
After completing Andrew Ng's online Machine Learning course, I applied my knowledge to develop and deploy a stock trading algorithm focused on the volatility of 'low-float gap-up stocks'. I designed a pipeline to scrape and clean stock market data, and trained the model using supervised learning with backpropagation. I then deployed the trained model weights to an AWS EC2 server, integrating automation to enable live trading on the stock market. This project emphasizes my skills in data engineering, machine learning, and cloud deployment to solve a real-world problem.