Hello : ) My name is Mickey Sanchez. I'm a jazzy queerdo just being emo and enjoying life. I spend the vast majority of my time making video games these days. I have a game company with my biz partner Brendan called New Beings. You can see the timeline of our work on our site.
My current main personal project is a very gamey game I've been working on since August 2022 called Order Automatica. It's a single player auto battler about compulsion. I plan to release it commerically 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'm pretty proud of these two small jam games I made solo in 2023: First Contact Department and Possibility Space. You can play them both for free in a web browser, and both take less that 15 minutes to complete.
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.
Prior to that, I led a couple game-related workshops: 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 (this was cancelled due to covid, but 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.