Videozax

Hello! I'm Zachary (Zax) Nathanson, and I love developing games! I'm currently a junior at Champlain College for Game Design. I specialize in System and Mechanic design. My engine of choice is Unity, but I've worked significantly in Unreal Engine as well.

I really enjoy making smaller games, so I've been mostly working in my free time on Game Jams,  but I'm cooking up something bigger right now.

Lasso Legend - Draw a Perfect Circle! - Available to play

Lasso Legend is a horde survival game I made solo for the 2025 Game Maker's Toolkit Game Jam. The player uses their mouse to draw circles around enemies, and the damage dealt to them scales with how perfect the circle drawn is.

• Circle Drawing Calculations: Programming-wise, the thing I'm most proud of is the Circle Drawing system. A player can draw a circle of any size, and once it's finished, the game calculates how perfect the circle is, then detects which enemies are inside and deals damage to them. To make sure the player experience was good, I added some leniency so that a player didn’t need to draw a truly perfect circle for the game to treat it as 100%.
• Complementary Enemy Designs: I took great care to make sure each of the seven enemy types is both unique and synergistic with the others. This made the enemies themselves memorable, and when combined, they consistently created unique combat challenges that kept the game feeling fresh.
• Rigorous Playtesting: This was a four-day jam, and I spent the last two days fully focused on playtesting and tweaks. Because of that, the game now has a well-paced difficulty curve, teaches the player effectively, and provides appropriate feedback, all of which wouldn’t have made it into the game without those playtests.

Veni Vidi Vroom - Arena Combat With a Car! - Available to play

Veni Vidi Vroom is an Arena Combat game made for the 2025 Big Mode Game Jam. The game focuses on constantly keeping the player in the action, and making the player feel powerful. I made this with a team of 5, wherein I did design and implementation. 

• Satisfying Movement System: I spent a significant portion of this Jam creating and tuning the movement system. One trick I pulled is that their is actually secret slight auto aim on the car's dash, allowing players to hit their targets more easily, without realizing it's not because of their own doing.
• Upgrades: Between each round the player can use their points they accrued to buy upgrades for their car. This adds some replay ability to the game, and keeps the players feeling powerful.
• Engaging "Moments": Our team decided early on that the game should have one time memorable moments that happens in our game. We ended up adding a intro cutscene, joke boss, and end credits, as well as many other small ones throughout.

More The Merrier Demo - Horde Shmup - Available to play 

In More the Merrier you control an ever growing party of adventures trying to save their world from destruction. I made this in the summer of 2024. This version is a demo I sent out to people to gather playtesting feedback.

• 12 Characters: The demo features 12 unique characters that each have different attacks and abilities that make choosing which ones to bring into battle an interesting strategic choice, as well as keeping every new unlock exciting for the player.
• 7 Levels: The game has 7 unique levels, each with their own boss, keeping each on memorable. 
• Save System: The demo features an automatic save system that will remember the player's unlocks when closing the game.
• Pixel Art: The game is fully made with pixel art done myself, further enhanced with in game effects and animations.