Julian Pearson Rickenbach

When I joined Mechanical Moonworks I inherited a codebase over a decade in the making. We're aiming to ship by Q2 2027, and I work closely with the lead designer and art director on the systems that get us there.

I'm focused on UI and RPG systems. Recent contributions: a map-style Dungeon Select menu, scaffolding for the RPG systems (abilities, achievements, career progression), and ongoing debug work across the codebase.

Part-time, available for other work.

Zombulacrum is my solo passion project, two years in and counting. It sits behind my main work these days, but I keep coming back to it. The original concept was a top-down RTS / tower-defense hybrid set in a voxel world. It's morphed since then into something closer to the game I actually want to play: a co-op survival horror with an ambient, mysterious vibe and the DNA of Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies, Resident Evil 4, and Valheim. Stranded with nothing but your friends and what you can scavenge.

Built in Godot 4 on a procgen heightmap world. Still pre-alpha, but the foundation is there.

Couch-competitive platform fighter inspired by Super Smash Bros., where players build custom mechs by mixing head, torso, arm, and leg parts that determine each mech's moveset, similar to building a kart in Mario Kart. Built in two months as the final project for UC Berkeley's Game Design and Development DeCal: I pitched the concept and was voted in by classmates to lead.

I managed the 5-person team, programmed core systems and git workflow, drew the pixel art for the mechs, and rigged and animated their 2D skeletons with IK in Unity. The team continues to work on a new version today.

Leading the team taught me that delegating meaningful work is harder than it looks, and I'm still developing the skill.

Third-person action-adventure built in Unreal 5 for MMAN 41B: Game Development at Berkeley City College. The player explores infested plaguelands, solves puzzles, and casts spells to defeat plague monsters and save their partner.

I implemented the HUD UI and the save/load progression logic, contributed heavily to QA and playtesting, and recorded the walkthrough. By the second half of the project I was handling a good chunk of the programming. This was my first serious Unreal project, and joining mid-development taught me a lot about adapting to a team's existing conventions on the fly. Our project lead Jake's lead-by-example style stuck with me, and I leaned on it when I led teams later.

3D animated short about the circle of life, told through fishes. Made for UC Berkeley's UCBUGG Computer Animation DeCal in Maya, rendered in Pixar's Renderman. I pitched the concept as an animatic and was voted in by classmates to direct.

This was the first time I ever pitched an idea to a group. Getting picked helped me get over the fear of doing it again, and I've used the skill on most projects since. I also came away with a real respect for how labor-intensive 3D modelling and animation are.

This was the first substantive independent programming project I ever took on, and the first one I made that I felt really proud of. John Conway's Game of Life had fascinated me for years from old YouTube videos before I finally had the chops to build a version of my own. It started out as my CIS 25: Data Structures and Algorithms final at Laney College and kept growing past the assignment. Along the way I picked up a bunch of desktop-app fundamentals (windowing, input handling, file I/O) and the ping-pong double-buffer pattern.

Looking back at it now, five years on, I can see how naive I was as a programmer. But I also feel proud of how solid some of my software architecture fundamentals were back then.