photo by hannahkeliza
Hello : ) My name is Mickey Sanchez. I'm a jazzy queerdo who likes to be emo and enjoy life.
I spend the majority of my creative time making video games these days. I have a game company with my biz partner Brendan called New Beings. You can check out what we've worked on at our website.
I have been contracting as a full time content designer on a 3D platformer called Big Hops, since January 2024.
I did a lot of solo game jams in 2023. In June I made First Contact Department, a game about translating alien messages. It was later selected to be part of the Hand Eye Society's Super FESTival. In November I made a game for Ludum Dare 54 called Deadlinez. It came in 22nd in the Overall category. I've updated it a couple times since then. In July I made Possibility Space. It is a word game about exploring the possible outcomes of a conversation. It was selected to be a part of an indie game anthology, Indiepocalypse Issue 49. A spinoff game, occident, was selected to be a part of the Confounding Calendar in December 2023.
I've been working on a commercial side project since August 2022 called Order Automatica. It's a single player auto battler with a lot of systemic interaction. I plan to release it on PC and maybe mobile when it's done, but I've been putting out regular releases you can play in the browser to get feedback. I've also been writing devlogs about the process. Check those links to see who else has helped me out.
I taught Intro To Game Development at the Pacific Northwest College Of Art and
Game Level Design and Game Design & Development at Portland Community College through 2021. I also did curriculum development for those aforementioned schools as well as Portland State University at the end of 2023.
Prior to that, my teaching experience was limited to a couple one-off workshops I taught in different contexts: Storytelling and Game Design With Twine and Planning Strategies For Game Development.
In June 2020 I released a video game that I wrote, co-programmed, and composed-for called Robot Island. It is a game about empathy, isolation, and unmet needs
where you play as a robot flight attendant on a space ship. I made the game with friends under the studio name
New Beings.
I was interviewed about this game and pidzn club (see below) on
the Talking To Ghosts podcast.
I received a
RACC professional development
grant
in 2019 to attend Train Jam where I created a Bruce Lee
dating simulator called Warm Marble. In 2020, I was accepted into the
Glitch Power Levelling Program, a professional development
program for creative leadership in the games industry (GDC was cancelled that year due to covid, but there was a bit of online stuff and at least they accepted me amirite?). I was invited to do a talk for the
Portland Indie Game Squad about my games in August 2020,
and I created a video piece called
Talking About Personal Stuffs: A Video Zine Talk By Mickey
for the occasion.
I was commisioned in the winter of 2020 to create a piece called
Hemoglobin Count 2077
for the East Portland Arts and Literary Festival online zine, Caring For Our Shared Futures.
In 2018, me and my collaborators, Lu Yim, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Yun Chiu,
received a grant from the Precipice Fund (Portland Institute For
Contemporary Art) to create pidzn club, an online publication
and curatorial project
featuring artists creating within the virtual and physical Asian Diaspora.
We produced a group art show in August 2019. We also received a
RACC Project Grant to continue our work in 2020. We used this to
produce another group show in 2021, and to add more projects to our online publication.
In 2010, I got my M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU, where I mainly studied the history of performance art and did a few o.k. performances of my own.
I currently live on the traditional lands of Cowlitz, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Clackamas and many other tribes, which
is presently known as Portland, OR, with my partner Hannah Krafcik.