a portfolio of the work of

Zach Tsiakalis-Brown

Recent Digital Art

a selection of the usable weapons in Vertigo 2

I find myself applying a huge number of disciplines while working on my games. I am the artist, the programmer, the animator. I am the sound engineer and the composer of the soundtracks. I design levels, I write scripts, and I draw storyboards. I gladly juggle a hundred tasks, because it forces me to learn and expand and try new things. It's slow, very slow, but I am willing to put the time in.

Music Production

Here are some of my favorite tracks. I’ve got lots more!

Game Development

Coding is more difficult to show off than art or music, so I'll just share some videos of projects I have worked on over the years. There are countless ones that would be impossible to list, but these are my most notable.

The Lab: Hands On

One of the most interesting and challenging projects I had the pleasure of working on at Valve. The Lab was made in 2015 as a series of tech demonstrations for the HTC Vive, and became Valve’s debut VR title. With the release of the Valve Index in 2019, it made sense to update it for the modern state-of-the-art. No small undertaking, as it turns out.

P3tr

P3tr is a game I created for an event called Ludum Dare. Contestants have 48 hours to create a game completely from scratch (all art, code, sounds, etc) that complies with a rigid theme. The theme during the event I participated in was "running out of power."

Out of nearly a thousand entries from all over the world, I placed third overall. I placed second in the graphics category.

Below is a short video, and a link to the entry with more information (and a download, should you like to try it out).

Vertigo

Vertigo is the virtual reality game Errol Bucy, George Eracleous, and I released in December of 2016. I published it on the digital marketplace Steam, and it has sold thousands of copies worldwide.

Of course, it was not a perfect game. It was made on a budget of effectively zero, by some teenagers. That being said, it has decently high reviews on steam and from formal reviewers, and I learned a huge amount from the experience. Additionally, the profits are helping fund the sequel, and I expect Vertigo 2 to far surpass the first.

Here is a review from a popular virtual reality youtuber

Knuckles

I was brought on by Valve to create this tech demo for the Valve Index controllers, codenamed Knuckles at the time. This was one of the first experiments utilizing their full finger tracking capabilities.

I also wrote detailed documentation on my interaction system, and shared the source so that other developers can benifit from the time I spend figuring it out.

Moondust

With new versions of Knuckles on the way, I was brought on board at Valve again to work on a new tech demo exploring the controllers’ capabilities. I called this one Moondust, and it was a much more fully fleshed out experience. Over the years I made various improvements and updates, so here’s a video showing off the latest release.

Like the last tech demo, I shared all of my work with the VR developer community. It was integrated into the official SteamVR Unity plugin, and Moondust was also made open source.

Vertigo 2

Vertigo 2’s development is ongoing! I released a free demo showing a hefty 45 minute vertical slice of the game in summer 2019. It has a much larger scope than the original Vertigo, but it’s coming along nicely.