Captured moments before I started ranting about how plants are fractals.
Clair Hayden
Games have always been important to me; I spent much of my childhood living overseas, and they allowed me to make new friends, as well as keep in touch with old ones.
When I was in 4th Grade, I wrote a letter to my future self, guessing what I would be doing when I grew up. I thought that when I was older, I would be making videogames in New York City. Turns out, my 4th grade self knew exactly where I would end up!
I studied Game Design and Computer Science at NYU, where I was lucky enough to be taught by industry figures like Ken Perlin, Bennett Foddy, and others. I had the pleasure of TAing both semesters my Senior year with Alexander King and Jesse Fuchs, where I got to work on my ability to teach and give useful feedback in playtesting. I’m also lucky enough to have an amazing network of peers as a result!
My passion is using interesting bits of technology in novel ways to make innovative, daring, intuitive games. Whether it’s using something as simple as an array to rewind time, cellular automata to make music or unique structures, voxels to make interactive, destructible scenes, overwriting the music memory in PICO-8 to serve as a second screen space, or using 3D noise to generate planets complete with 4D dynamic clouds, I’m always trying to think of ways I can use the various tools I’ve learned to make something entirely new.
Solving puzzles, coding eureka moments, and seeing systems I designed produce interesting, emergent results, all give me a rush like no other. If you’ve got a fun challenge for me, hit me up!