Videozax

Hello! I'm Zachary (Zax) Nathanson, and I love developing games! I'm currently a Game Designer at Frame Interactive, working on The Free Shepherd. I'm also completing my senior 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.

GATTAI - CO-OP On Rails Shooter - Available to Play

GATTAI is a two-player co-op 3D rail shooter created for the 2026 Ubisoft Game Lab competition. Over a 10-week period, our team competed against 25 other teams to deliver a polished, playable experience. Out of 10 awards, we won Best 3Cs and Best Art Direction and Production.

• Two Player Co-op: The whole game is designed around you and a teammate working together to solve problems. The player's mechanics, enemy designs, and levels all encourage communication.
• 3 Levels: The game has three unique levels, each slowly introducing mechanics and smoothly ramping up in difficulty to craft a game that is beatable on the first go without being trivial.
• A Climactic Boss Fight: I developed a flashy, two-phase final boss fight against "Captain Crunchtime," complete with five distinct attack patterns and custom voice throughout.

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.