Passion projects

Independent work

Miscellaneous work and passion projects.

Role: Designer, artist, filmmaker
Tools: Digital painting, video, AI image and video tools

The Sword of Powerful

A Halloween short family film I produced with my kids. About 12 minutes.

AI-assisted

MERCS: Ground Zero

A hybrid board game and phone app I'm developing. As a team, players fight to lock down the facility's key control rooms and contain a viral mutant outbreak before it spreads. The board, cards and dice carry the strategy; the app tracks each mercenary's progress and level-ups, and turns the big moments, shooting, picking locks, sprinting, into quick skill games on the phone. The logo, cards, boards and portraits were made with AI image tools under my art direction.

AI-assisted

MERCS Ground Zero: the phone app in hand beside the board, room cards and item cards

The phone appMy working prototype. Each action, shoot, sprint, unlock, mutate and deploy, is a quick skill game on the phone that feeds the board game.

Control rooms

Lock a room down and its control point is yours: each one bends the rules in the team's favor.

Gear and supplies

Loot the facility for the tools to survive it.

Hunters and Telepath board with a threat tracker — Enemy board with the threat tracker

The mercs

XP tokens, earned on the board and spent in the app.

Monster Mercs

No AI used

A second game of my own, from the same love of mercenary missions, in a completely different key. Where Ground Zero is grim sci-fi horror, Monster Mercs is a monster comedy built around dice. You play monsters for hire, a vampire, a werewolf, a ghost, taking contracts to stop the monster world from bleeding into the human one, and between jobs you slip into a secret underground network of services to upgrade your abilities and gear. I designed the game and painted every piece of art in it by hand, including the tactical-pouch-style player board.

The Monster Mercs player board open, loaded with weapon cards, medals and ammo, with dice and a hand of cards

The player board opened like a field pouch, with the unit patch and tactics sheet

The player board with the character ID tag, ammo loops and ability medals

Each player's board opens like a military utility pouch, with webbing and pockets for cards, medals and ammo.

The player board, in 3DClosed, turned over, opened one flap at a time, then loaded with weapon cards. A 3D mockup I built from the print files.

Grab it, use it, toss it

Most weapons are one-shot: pick one up, swing or throw, discard. Each rolls its own colored dice for a different chance to hit.

Custom-painted elite weapons

The big guns have names, paint jobs and personalities.

Crossing Guard, a sniper rifle wrapped in caution tape

Monster snacks

Power-ups no soldier would touch.

Monster abilities

Your monster's powers roll their own special dice.

The mercs

Ghost, a pumpkin-headed merc in a hood — Ghost

Goodboy, a scarred merc with an eyepatch — Goodboy

Daddy, I Think I Saw an Elephant

A picture book for a private client, and one of my first paid projects made with AI. I wasn't sure what a commission with AI would be like. It turned out really well: I made a book in a soft storybook style I don't usually work in, and the client was very happy with the result. It still took far more work than I expected. I art directed every image, turned down any output that wasn't exactly what I was after, and edited much of the art by hand.

AI-assisted