Lena Jeon
Video Game Production and Design
MS in Game Design and Development at USC
Video Game Production and Design
MS in Game Design and Development at USC
I keep track of all the games I've helped out with here on Itch.io (click me).
Making games so I can make them for a living.
I hope to use my skills to help produce games in the gaming industry.
I am currently based in Los Angeles.
Academic background: B.A. in Computer Science, Minor in Japanese from UC Berkeley (Class of 2023).
Currently enrolled at USC's Game Design and
Development Master's program (expected graduation: 2025).
For inquiries, email me at: bluekkachi.dev@gmail.com
I also go by "Bluekkachi".
All of my social media can be found down below in the Links section.
Generally speaking, I do not use social media. If it's not linked here, it's probably not me.
Guide the trains to their destinations!
Winner of Bear Jams Fall 2022.
Estimated playtime of 5-10 minutes.
A simple puzzle game, made for UC Berkeley's
Bear Jams Fall 2022,
a 45-hour game jam held from October 28th to October 30th.
I led our impromptu team of 6 by establishing a clear project vision and breaking
down the tasks required to reach our own destination.
Credits: Producer, Designer, Artist (pixel)
A turn-based RPG with visual novel-style story cutscenes.
The demo contains
about an hour of content.
Follow an unlikely trio on their journey up to defeat the Obsidian Drake atop Anvite
Mountain.
Features a unique Augment Battle System, allowing players to modify moves to create
various effects.
Interwoven has been in development since Spring 2020. I am responsible for the
game's pixel art and helped with the design and production process. I currently help
with testing and polish. (Made in a team of 4.)
As Designer…
Interwoven's battle system is its main draw. It was inspired by games like
Bravely Default, Shin Megami Tensei, and Granblue Fantasy, in how all three
games let you play with fun buff and debuff stacking to manage your stats and
damage.
"Fun" is the primary goal of Interwoven--it's a game we made for ourselves, that
eventually grew to a product we could distribute to others. Our team all agreed
that there are few things more fun than going crazy with a flexible battle
system against challenging foes.
Credits: Producer, Director, Artist, Lead Programmer, etc.
A bite-sized JRPG experience (~5-10 minutes). I was the project lead, along with
being the sole pixel artist and programming lead on a team of 4. Ghost Quest
was the first experience I completed.
Play as a ghost who was kicked out of your body by an evil force.
Left with the power to travel between the material and spiritual world,
embark on a journey to take your body back from the rude being that robbed you.
Made for UC Berkeley's Game Design and Development DeCal course.
(Course information
| "What is a DeCal?")
As Director…
Ghost Quest was pitched as "a game that can be used to create other games." We
only had about a month to complete it, and our team was all new to Unity. Thus,
our main goal was to create frameworks for basic systems needed to create a
larger game, rather than trying to make a full-fledged RPG off the bat.
I consider the project a success, as we achieved what we set out to do.
Additionally, the act of finishing a project successfully gave me the momentum
and confidence to try diving deeper into game development. Should I be drawn
back to the Unity engine for whatever reason, I still have Ghost Quest's code
and basic event systems to use as a starting point.
My project writeups from UC Berkeley's Computer Graphics course. I programmed
various computer graphics-related projects, including
a ray-tracer, a cloth simulator, various shaders, a triangle mesh generator, a
rasterizer, and more.
For the class's final project, I led a team of 4 in implementing a cel shader in
Unity's Universal Render Pipeline.
Credits: Director, Producer, Designer, Artist (pixel), Lead Programmer
A 15-20 minute, top-down, 2D adventure RPG.
Four people wake up in an unfamiliar setting and must work together to unravel the
mysteries behind their circumstances. No clear answers are presented, but even so, a
decision must be made, and you must
press on…
Made using the Godot Engine (ver. 3.5) as a side project with a team of 8.
Development spanned spring to summer 2023, with polish lasting from fall to winter
2023.
This was my first time recruiting people for a project--it was also my first time
acting as an interviewer rather than interviewee. I acted as creative director,
producer, and lead programmer. I learned a lot about Godot, project management, and
what goes into directing a game as
I taught my fellow programmers and myself the engine parallel to development.
As Director…
My primary goal with Stray Stars was to evoke how I feel when I finish a Shin Megami Tensei game. If I had to put it into words, I've described this
feeling as being "empty, yet full." …As you can likely tell, I'm not very good at putting that feeling into words. So I tried conveying it through this game instead.
Looking back, the game's themes of uncertain truths and unverifiable
circumstances were also inspired by Umineko: When They Cry. Similar to how Umineko and Shin Megami Tensei are to me, I will be satisfied if Stray Stars can also be the kind of odd game that creeps into your memory from time to time.
A 2D pixel RPG with fourth-wall breaking elements at its core.
Take control of Will, a young boy, in a game whose contents have been corrupted for
mysterious reasons. The game makes use of "metapuzzles," where players must move
game files around or do other "meta" tasks beyond the game window to solve puzzles.
Made with a team of 20 as an MFA thesis project for USC's Interactive Media and
Games department. Free Will has been in development since Summer 2023, and is
planned to release on Steam by the end of May 2024.
In producing Free Will, I mostly acted as the director's assistant in delegating
tasks, solving production issues, and communicating across departments. In addition,
my role as art lead lended me a strong vision for how the game should look and feel
to play. My background in programming was helpful in communicating to the
programming team about asset implementation and general game feel.
As the art lead, I primarily assigned tasks to our team's 3 other artists in addition to handling all sprite animations. If it's pixel and it moves, it was drawn by me. I also mocked up and created the assets used for the game's UI windows, namely the inventory menu and battle screen.
As Lead Artist…
Part of the vision for Free Will was for it to look like it was "clearly a
game." Thus, we shot for a retro, pixel RPG look that doubled an homage to the
RPG Maker games that inspired it, such as Oneshot, Ib, and The Witch's House.
In crafting its aesthetic style, I primarily drew inspiration from EarthBound
Zero/Beginnings, Pokémon Red and Blue, and a lesser-known game called Azusa 999.
As Producer…
Free Will's production process and execution has received high praise from the USC community. Student productions rarely ever release at the end of the spring semester, but Free Will is an outlier in this regard. It was the first game to be available fully on Steam out of any of the other thesis projects shown.
This is largely thanks to the team, who did the tasks I assigned them as producer. That said, flexible planning played a large part in the game's successful production process. The director and I worked closely to scope the game down to about one semester's worth of work (Fall) and allocated the spring semester for polish and bleed over. As planned, the project did bleed over into spring, but even with this spillover we were able to fit in about a full month of polish.
Though on release the game still had a few rough edges and a version 1.1 already in the pipeline, namely for a streamer-friendly mode due to the game's peculiarities, it being ready for release at all is considered something of a miracle as far as USC MFA projects go.
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