The irritation
Ernie began with a stubborn visual joke: what would a heroic game feel like if its hero moved at the pace of a garden snail?
GameBuildingIn development
Ernie the Snail
A character-driven 3D game about a determined snail, built through years of level design, behavior systems, hazards, and iteration.
- Current state
- Building — In development
- Jack’s role
- Game design, Gameplay programming, Level design, 3D production
- Find it in the workshop
- Arcade & Menagerie · Garden terrarium
Built because…
The real build story.
What I built
I developed an eleven-level campaign with stamina, power-ups, salt hazards, enemy behavior, navigation, and a growing set of environmental interactions.
The hard part
A slow protagonist changes the fundamentals of timing, camera, level scale, feedback, and difficulty. The world has to stay lively without making movement feel punitive.
Under the casing
Proof, not decoration.
Build evidence03 items
- An eleven-level campaign with hazards and power-ups
- Enemy behavior, stamina, navigation, and environmental systems
- A long-running Unreal project with an active Unity port
- Unreal Engine
- Unity
- Behavior systems
- 3D art
- Level tooling
Scope of work
What I owned.
- Game design
- Gameplay programming
- Level design
- 3D production
No victory-lap math
Outcome and lesson.
Where it landed
Ernie is an active, substantial game project with both Unreal work and a Unity port—not a single-scene concept or a mascot attached to a menu.
What stayed
A memorable constraint can generate years of design decisions. The challenge is protecting the original personality while rebuilding the underlying systems.
Field notes
This project has a physical address.
In the playable workshop, Ernie the Snail lives in the Arcade & Menagerie as a garden terrarium. You can inspect it without unlocking anything.