I Made a Fighting Game!
August 10th, 2026
It's been a while since my last post, there's good reasons for that but it mainly comes down to the fact that I've simply been busy. In late 2024 I moved from Texas to California, mainly due to in an increase in anti-trans sentiment across the country that made living there much more dangerous. My lease was up roughly around the same time my girlfriend was moving to Socal to relocate for her job at Blizzard, so I thought it was the best opportunity I'd have to get out. I packed up everything I could into my car and we road tripped across half the United States to our new apartment.
Part of my reasoning was to give myself the best possible opportunity to find work in the games industry, and Socal is famously a hotbed of game develepors and studios. With how rough the industry has been, I didn't expect to find work as quickly as I did, yet...
I ended up getting a job at Quarter Up working on Invincible Versus, first as quality assurance, then moving to design in March of 2025! I attribute this mainly to being in the right place at the right time; fighting games are the genre I'm most familiar with, and I'd created some mods for Strive that built up proficiency with Unreal 5.
I learned so much working with this team, and met a lot of great people. The highlight for me was probably getting to take the demo build to EVO in 2025 (pre-saudi buyout) and see how people approach the game. Recording for the character deep dives was also a great experience. I loved talking about how I felt regarding the character designs and fighting styles.
This July, shortly following the release of Invincible VS, myself and many of my co-workers were laid off. It's not wholly unexpected, but disappointing nonetheless. I'm proud of the work we did on the game, and I'd love to go more in-depth with my evolving thoughts on game design here! I have a lot more free time, after all.
I don't actually feel like this post has done much to illustrate where my life is at this point, but I can't cover so much in one post... I don't even live in Socal anymore! I'm up in Seattle now. That'd be a fun thing to write about...
Anyway. Sorry about the lack of coffee reviews. They might be supplanted by my fencing brain dumps (I started longsword fencing!!!)