About Me

I'm Ethan, also known as CosmicBoogaloo online. I'm an independent developer building Tales of Epitome entirely by myself. Engine, gameplay, tools, art direction, everything.

I started as a modder. I created over 60 mods for games like Skyrim on NexusMods, which taught me a lot about working inside existing game engines and understanding what makes games tick at a technical level. But modding someone else's game only takes you so far when you have your own vision burning a hole in your brain.

Tales of Epitome started as a prototype in Unreal Engine 5. I had character controllers, combat systems, the whole thing set up in Blueprints and C++. But the game I was trying to make doesn't look like an Unreal game. It looks like something from 2003. And after months of fighting the engine's defaults trying to make it look retro, I made the call to build my own engine from scratch in Rust.

That engine is the Epitome Engine. A purpose-built PSX/PS2 aesthetic renderer that doesn't try to be a general purpose tool. It does one thing, makes games that look like lost PS2 classics, and it does it better than any off-the-shelf solution ever could. Because the engine IS the art direction.

I work in Rust, C++, Python, WGSL shaders, Blender, and whatever else the project needs on any given day. I believe the best games come from singular creative visions and I'd rather build every piece myself and know it inside out than depend on tools that fight what I'm trying to do.