About Me

Who am I?

To reiterate, I'm Leslie Graff.  But I'm also currently based in northeastern Oklahoma and studying Computer Simulation and Game Design at the University of Tulsa. As of now, I'm a freelance artist, composer, and writer, and have worked primarily in the landscape architecture field as a concept artist/graphic designer and narrative designer for independent game studios like FrozenPixel Games.

 I graduate in the spring of this year. And am looking for work starting in the fall after I finish my contract with ID Tech as a game design instructor over the summer.

Education

I went to high school at Jenks Public Schools and made the most out of my advanced placement opportunities so that I could graduate from college a year early. Generally, I do very well in school, as I've always been motivated to learn and problem-solve. I am teachable, but don't need my hand held during training. If you need me to learn something quickly, I can do it. I'm generally self-taught and have many interests across multiple disciplines. I also love sharing the things that I've learned with others. I take advantage of opportunities to teach and mentor others, always learning more about how others take in information. For example, this TED talk I did sophomore year of high school demonstrates how D&D and other role-playing games benefit the developing minds of kids and teens.

I am also now Unity certified! (Unity Certified Associate: Game Developer)

As of 5/3/25, I also have the Unity Artist Certification!

Areas of Experience

I experiment and dabble in multiple disciplines as a hobbyist, for school, and in my freelance work. I'll start with the things I'm most adept at and work my way down. (This is not an all-inclusive list.)

• Creative Writing: //My longest-standing interest. (Honestly, I enjoy writing in general.)

• Concept Art and Character Design: //I've been teaching myself to draw since 6th grade.

• Composing and Performing Music: //9 years of experience

• Worldbuilding and Game level design: //Since Highschool.

• Block coding

• Storyboarding and 2D animation

• 3D modeling and animation

• Graphic Design

• Website design and Social Media algorithm analysis

• Video production and editing

• Programming

• And experience with game engines such as: 

  • GB Studio, Construct 3, Ren'py, RPG maker, GDevelop, and Unity

Check the home page for links to examples of my work on other sites, and this site for my writing and composition portfolios!

Accomplishments

Here are a few of my recent accomplishments: 🎉

• I have 4 published written works including a short story and a collection of poetry

  • Selected by a committee of jurors to be featured in the Stylus magazine!

• Our capstone project which I led was nominated for the Pelton Award

• I graduated with ECS Honors and Awards

• Awarded "Best Attorney" during school-sponsored mock trial competition

• I am now a successful Construct 3 tutor after teaching myself the software

• Multiple music performance awards for OkMEA All-State and NCDA

• Was a published writer in the TU Collegian newspaper

• Led/taught classes and and small groups 

• Have had art selected for multiple competitions, including TU's Gussman Juried Student Exhibition

  • Update: I won a merit award for the 56th Gussman exhibition just this year in Digital Illustration!

• I am a Distinguished Service Graduate (Over 200 hours of recorded community service)

• Led teams and completed multiple games during 48-hour game jams

• Honor roll student throughout high school and college

• AP Scholar and AP Scholar with Distinction

• I achieved a promotion for my efficient work during my second contract with LandPlan Consultants 

Who am I, really though?

You've reached the fun facts portion: Congratulations!

• My phone lock screen is a rotating slideshow of pictures dedicated to Kermit the Frog 🐸

• I can rollerblade backwards, (And forwards obviously...) 

• I love to read! My favorite books are usually the classics, Crime and Punishment, Dune... 📖

• My favorite games are resource management titles like Oxygen Not Included and Slime Rancher

• I watch Let'sPlays of a lot of story-driven games and analyze how they write and what they do

• I have a million different creative hobbies, and still more that I'd like to explore in the future

• Recently I've been learning how to build my own PC! Super interesting.

• I am happiest when taking long drives in my car late at night with the radio blasting. 🚗

• I can hold my breath underwater for one minute and twenty seconds. 

• I have an expansive knowledge of personality pseudoscience and productivity tools 📈

• I keep in touch with multiple pen pals around the world! 🌏

• I play Tetris when I'm stressed! (Studies have shown Tetris actually helps with stress!)

• I have a passion for garlic bread. 👀

• I am allegedly a cool person to hang out with. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

The Blog Bog (Occasional work-life updates)

This is where I occasionally release updates about my life and the things I'm learning!

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

I've been attempting to figure out a better way to showcase my writing portfolio and generally make my portfolio more accessible and easy to navigate. I've considered creating notion sites but I would need to look into it a bit more if I really want to commit to the transfer. So in the meantime I may just be creating subpages for my writing portfolio because I just learned that I can do that, while updating my site for a portfolio assignment so hopefully that solves my problems for now. I tried out the free version of Clippings which is a writing portfolio software, however, it doesn't allow you to upload PDFs for free which does not make my process any more streamlined, even if the user interface does look nice. I'll keep a lookout casually and hopefully my tentative solution pans out well. 

Sunday, April 6, 2025

It's been a while but I'm starting up with the unity creator core pathway and it asked me to reflect on what I hope to learn and accomplish. I'm more of a writer primarily, but the part of 3D art in game design that I think I'll be most engaged by is post processing and lighting. There was a point in my life where I thought it would be really fun to be a film colorist, and I think it scratches that same itch. I'm hoping to become a little more comfortable with the unity editor in general and hope to make some nice pieces to put into my portfolio for future industry jobs. 

Recently I also was accepted to my first industry related job teaching game design at ID Tech camps over the summer in Colorado. I'm really excited to be able to share my knowledge, teach, and hopefully cultivate inspiration concerning the field of game development and design. 

Last but not least, we're nearing the end of development for Critical Density and I'm excited to see if we can execute on the plan that I laid out for the last sprint of our development process. We've made a lot of adjustments and I think the game is finally really coming together.  It's just a matter of balancing all of the schoolwork with what is effectively a full time job already. Tough stuff but not impossible!

Monday, October 1, 2024

I have been promoted to Narrative Lead for the senior game development project due to my organizational efforts and specific writing skillset. Today we solved the issue of how we wanted to format the script for our game so that it would be easy to show off as portfolio work and could be directly implemented into unity. After talking with the development side we decided to go with Twine since it can export easily into the needed CSV format and can be visually represented nicely for the people actually writing the narrative portions. Since Twine has very limited sharing options, we are however utilizing google docs to work collaboratively on bringing the narrative to life. I feel at peace knowing that I am able to ensure that our narrative goals are met and that the Design Lead can divert all his focus on to the visual design instead of also having to juggle the narrative. I am excited to get experience leading a long term team and learning to communicate with them and the other leads.  

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

School has begun again, and I am on the design team for the senior game development project. I think I really enjoy being able to collaborate with other creative people and help support my team by helping to organize our affairs and ensure that key items are completed by the dates that they are due. I am doing my best to go above and beyond with this project since I was the person responsible for pitching the selected main gameplay, and narrative ideas. I am excited to elevate the standard for senior game design projects for the university, and hope that everyone can work together to make this concept a reality. Recently I've been writing questlines since I already plotted out most of the narrative points. I'm also doing concept art and renders for six of the most important characters to the story. Before Thursday I hope to also help decide the direction, we want our color pallet to lean in by making example thumbnails of the colors for ideation and critique from the rest of the design team. I'm working closely with the design and development leads in order to ensure this project takes off and is a smashing success. So far it is coming along really nicely, and I'll soon also be able to do a lot of audio and music for the game since I'm learning how to use the Audio Kinetic Software and taking the WWise tutorials in order to learn the ins and outs of game scoring from a technical perspective.

Wednesday, August 13, 2024

With my first solo game launched and released on itch.io, I feel a great sense of contentment and satisfaction in being able to add a new project to this portfolio. My last year of school is beginning soon, and I plan to continue working on future personal projects and developing my skills so that I can be a worthwhile addition to a future team. I'm going to tackle new courses learning more about agile development and user interaction design, as well as taking courses that sharpen my more creative skills like music scoring for games, and screenwriting. Looking forward to learning to enjoy the harder classes too, like physics and painting. (Odd combo, but painting is surprisingly challenging when you have shaky hands, haha.) ～(　TロT)σ»

Saturday, April 20, 2024

I am now a Unity-certified game developer! I've been waiting for this for two years now! The exam was a bit different than I originally expected but I managed to pass despite all the issues getting the exam started. It was a bit nerve-wracking but I decided to take it on as a celebration of things learned, rather than an exam that was expensive to retake. xD Things all worked out in the end, despite a myriad of technical difficulties, and thankfully my proctor was very understanding and polite.  We stay winning! 

Sunday, April 14, 2024

Today was my first day as a Construct 3 tutor! I worked with a younger student (Jonah) whom I had taught the basics of Scratch in the past. It was great, a bit grueling but fun nonetheless. Unfortunately, my laptop with my lesson notes broke during the first hour of our 4-hour tutoring session,  so I had to improvise on the job and do most of it from memory. However, I managed to turn it around, and by the end I had him grinning with glee at the game we created within just a few hours from nothing. He's now inspired to keep exploring on his own and feels he has a much higher level of comfort going into his own investigations of the software.

It was a great opportunity for me to get some on-the-job tutoring experience and I'd like to thank Jonah for bearing with the technical issues and being a great sport about the whole thing.

I'd love the opportunity to do something like this again!  ٩(｡•ㅅ•｡)و

Friday, April 5, 2024

I've been learning Construct 3 for about a week or two now and I really enjoy how intuitive it is and how expansive the free version of the application is. The convenience of being able to use it in the browser is also not to be understated. Tonight I started learning how to create JavaScript code in the built-in development environment, things are beginning to get interesting!

console.log("Hello world!"); 

//or if you prefer... 

alert("Hello world!"); //works too I suppose.