Zubin's Dungeon Quest

My path into game development started at age 7, teaching myself to build Minecraft mods in Java with nothing but curiosity and online tutorials, and that self-taught foundation eventually led me to a formal course at Arizona State University under Yoshihiro Kobayashi, where I learned to work in GameMaker Studio 2 and honed my skills in GML, a scripting language that blends C-like syntax with JavaScript-style functionality. When the Congressional App Challenge — a nationwide competition run by the U.S. House of Representatives that tasks students with building software to aid education — coincided with the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden global shift to online learning, I saw an opportunity to build something that mattered. Over the course of a year, I designed and developed Zubin's Dungeon Quest entirely from scratch in GML: a 2D roguelike with custom-drawn graphics, an original story, and, at its core, an educational engine woven directly into the gameplay loop. Rather than treating learning and play as separate, I built a trivia-driven progression system where players periodically face review questions tied to real coursework, and correct answers unlock skills and boosts needed to advance — turning studying into a mechanic instead of a chore. To make the system genuinely useful beyond my own classroom, I engineered the question bank around a CSV-based format compatible with the D2L learning management structure, so teachers and professors could import their own question sets and let students reinforce course material subconsciously while playing. The project won the 2021 Congressional App Challenge and marked the true beginning of my professional programming career — the first project where self-taught curiosity turned into a shipped, competition-winning piece of software.