Panda Quest

How to play

Overview

Where a lot of my other projects lean into combat and pressure, Panda Quest is intentionally gentle. There's no fail state chasing the player, just unfamiliar terrain to wander and small mementos to find and bring home. It's a five-minute game, built to be small on purpose, in the 48 hours of the 2019 Global Game Jam.

A small team, a tight timeline

I worked on Panda Quest with two teammates: Evan Wright led the environmental art and shared programming duties, and Hyun Joong Kim composed the music. I handled character design, programming, and animation. Splitting the work that way, and trusting each other with it under a hard deadline, was as much the exercise as the game itself.

Tone over combat

I built Panda Quest partly to prove to myself that I could design for mood and pacing, not just systems and encounters, a muscle that turned out to matter later, even on action-heavy titles like Kittens with Cannons and Saloonery, where quieter moments between fights still needed to land.

What I learned

Alongside Retro Duel, this was one of the early, small-scope projects that got me comfortable actually finishing and shipping something, a habit that carried straight through to leading a team and, eventually, releasing a full solo game.