Dansite | Home

My name is Dan Vicarel, and you've found my little corner of the Internet! I am a full-stack software engineer and game developer from Ohio. For my full credentials, check out my LinkedIn profile; this site is more of an interactive portfolio.

If you are looking to collaborate, please contact me at:

My Projects

Title screen with large white text on a black background with little green bacteria people and purple debris on a white surface

Root Canal (2023)

A 2D RTS game based on the "Roots" theme of Global Game Jam 2023.

Gameplay screenshot of the player's purple spaceship flying through space, dodging asteroids, and collecting treasure

"Space Game" (2022)

A 2D side-scroller where the player controls a ship collecting abandoned treasure in space. Built with Unity for a 2022 hackathon and adapted for my GDEX 2023 talk: Live Demo: Building an Interactive Enemy.

Title screen with white text on a fleshy background with little main character in white uniform with blue hat and a lever nearby

Body Maintenance (2020)

A 2D co-op platformer for up to 4 players based on the "Maintenance" theme of Global Game Jam 2020.

Title screen with white text surrounded by little white monster faces, in the background is an intimidating mansion on a distant hill at dusk with mysterious black spirits flying out and into the sky

Send Them Home (2019)

A 2D point-and-click adventure based on the "What home means to you" theme of Global Game Jam 2019.

Title screen with white text above a dark a mountainous terrain full of black rats with white eyes, and above them are two black human figures with white eyes, one holds a torch and the other holds the titular sword, which has a multicolor handle and a large purple flower-like blade

DemiSword: Bubonic (2018)

A 2D co-op side-scroller "horde" game based on the "Transmission" theme of Global Game Jam 2018.

UnityAssemblies (2019 - present)

A NuGet package to simplify making forward-compatible references to any Unity assembly on any platform.

UnityUtil (2016 - present)

A UPM package with classes/components useful to any Unity project in 2D or 3D. Includes components to facilitate dependency injection, logging, RNG, triggers, inventory, and more.

Gameplay screenshot showing the game's casino-like flashy lights and seven cards from which the player would choose the best hand

High Hand Hold'em™ (2017 - present)

A mobile card game where players choose the best Poker hand before time runs out. The debut mobile game of Derploid Entertainment, LLC—the studio that I started with a partner from the Cleveland Game Developers. Set to release in Q2 2024.

Title screen with white text on a red barn covered in fire and broken eggs with humanoid cows running toward it

Farmageddon: A Cattle Royale (2020 - 2022)

A novel battle royale game where each local player is generated by replaying the recorded actions of another player's previous run. Built in collaboration with Solidplasma Studios and released on Steam in 2021.

Gameplay screenshot of a silly low-resolution helicopter flying between grassy columns against a blue background

GravityCopter (2019)

A 2D Flappy Bird clone where players move a helicopter by shifting gravity through a procedurally generated course. Built in a couple days on vaction in 2019 and used to demo dependency injection in my GDEX 2021 talk: Singletons: You're Doing Them Wrong.

Derploid Website (2021 - present)

The landing site for Derploid® Entertainment, LLC—the studio that I started with a partner from the Cleveland Game Developers. A static site built with Jekyll/Bootstrap hosted on GitHub Pages.

The Dansite (2023 - present)

This website! A static site built with Jekyll/Bootstrap hosted on GitHub Pages, serving as my interactive portfolio.

Screenshot of the 2D space shooter game that I built for this talk, with an interactive enemy that looks like Jeff Bezos' head

Live Demo: Building an Interactive Enemy (2023)

A demo of building the "monster" from my Space Game, complete with graphics, sounds, basic AI/pathfinding, and health/damage. Shows my approaches to game architecture in Unity, emphasizing loosely coupled components and data-driven design.

Diagram from the talk, showing how apps connect to SSPs, to ad exchanges, to DSPs, to advertisers

Making Mobile Ads Less Awful (2023)

An overview of building ads into mobile video games: different kinds of ads, related tools and libraries, legal considerations, and tips to make ads less intrusive. In short, how to make ads less awful, both for developers and for players.

UML diagram of a class following the static singleton pattern, one of the (anti)patterns discussed in this talk

Singletons: You're Doing Them Wrong (2021)

Analyzed pros/cons of the controversial "singleton pattern", using concrete code examples from my GravityCopter game to explore procedural methods, static singletons, and dependency injection.

Advanced Gameplay Programming: If Statements (2021)

A somewhate tongue-in-cheek presentation of common pitfalls with conditional logic, as well as principles for improving the readability and extendibility of code.

Image of an original creature design from this talk, showing a kangaroo-like animal with wheel-like bones growing out of its shoulders

Designing New Lifeforms (2019)

A look at examples of good/bad creature design from games, books, and films. I draw from biological, chemical, astronomical, and anthropological principles to form a set of rules for designing lifeforms that are both fantastic and believable.

Image of the Unity, Visual Studio, and Git logos connected by lines with a red heart in the middle

Supercharging Your Unity Workflow With Visual Studio and Git (2019)

A two-part discussion of techniques to streamline Unity workflows with the Visual Studio IDE and Git version control system, drawing on over five years of professional software development experience.