Hi there! My name is Santos, and I currently attend UNC Chapel Hill! Born and raised in NC, I went to school in rural NC and lived just 15 minutes away from Mt. Olive Pickle Plant (you may have seen them in the pickle section at your grocery). Ever since I was a little kid, I have always wanted to design my own video games. My first handheld console with the Nintendo DS Lite and played various games such Sonic All Star Tennis (what really led me to want to design games), Mario Kart & Super Mario Bros, MySims, Pokémon Pearl, and many others. Other games I played while growing up were Spyro on the GBA and Pokémon Red on the Gameboy Color (my first Pokémon game). I had a level 100 Charizard with fire spin and slash, and I thought I was the most OP trainer ever. I also had an N64 growing up and enjoyed playing Mario Kart64 and Pokémon Stadium. Some of my favorite all time games include the Touhou Project and Pokémon Pearl. I have a very long list of video games I want to play. Some of those including Valorant, Space Channel 5 VR, Bravely Default, various fighting games (Super Smash Bros, Guilty Gear, Blaze Blue, Undernight In-Birth), and various other Pokémon and Zelda games!

My design journey started off early on in my childhood. I remember drawing and writing my own mechanics that I wanted to see in the games I played at a very young age on index cards. Growing up as a second-generation Hispanic individual in rural NC meant I didn't easily have much access to video games due to their cost (and also because my parents didn't really understand why I enjoyed video games). Surprisingly enough, I was able to find various games and consoles from friends and relatives and was always surrounded by video games in unexpected ways. Eventually I got my first laptop, and I researched how to make games and ultimately came to one conclusion: they all required programming of some sort. Through the self-learning process and lots of perseverance, I taught myself how to code, eventually stuck with a vertical shooter engine, and created various scripts and concepts throughout middle and high school. One of my projects even made it to the regional science fairs in NC.

In between that time frame, I became deeply involved in competitive Pokémon (quite good at it not to toot my own horn. P.S. I mainly played RU and monotype [electric and fairy teams]), and eventually learned lots of JavaScript and networking fundamentals by hosting my own PokemonShowdown server and developing my own custom features into my server that ran directly from my laptop. Aside from those things, I’m also a huge fan of various music artists and enjoy video game music as well. Some of my personal favorite artists include Lana Del Rey.

Throughout this entire process, I realized that I really loved to code, even if designing was my first passion. Much of my coursework revolves around programming and analyzing media which further develop my understanding of game mechanics and how to implement my designs. I still have various game ideas written from several years ago that I hope to create and explore throughout my life. My first official game stems from the idea that came from 5th grade me.