Nicolas Bloom

Character & Game Designer

Personal Projects

This category is for the various personal Game Design projects I have worked on, whether on my own or with a team, without the prompt of an academic assignment or Game Jam.


Creating a New NPC for Stardew Valley – PC (Mod)

A slightly modified version of the game’s title screen.

After playing the game Stardew Valley by Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone for a few years, I decided to spice it up a bit by downloading and using a few modifications. Eventually, I decided to make my own mod to test my character and game design capabilities, as well as familiarize myself with working inside a game. Going in, my only worry was that I wouldn’t be able to write intriguing dialogue to do my character justice – and looking back, that was the easy part. The game was written in a coding language I wasn’t familiar with – C# – so I had to teach myself parts of the language based on what I knew about C and C++, as well as how to use programs like Paint.NET to make pixel art for the mod. And so, after more than a month of self-teaching, coding, and quite a bit of pixel art, my first character mod was created – a character I named “Lucy.”


Project Dreamscape: Creating Assets for a Super Smash Bros. Mod

A top, left, front and orthographic view of a 3D Model for Shantae created in 3DS Max

The 3D Model I created for the character Shantae.

In 2019, a friend of mine introduced me to a little project where we would create assets for and conceptualize gameplay for characters that we would like to see in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in order to hone and polish our game design skills. Since I was introduced to the project, I have created concept art for two pre-existing characters that were not playable in the game. In addition, I got to use my skills in 3D modeling to create a model for Shantae, seeing as how no official 3D model exists that we could use.

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