↑ me and Alice

I’m Brian Hockenmaier, dad, engineer, and fun haver.

I grew up in Ventura, California with two UCLA-engineer parents. Even though neither of them were engineers long-term, I was an engineering child. I was always building something, highlights including a functional submarine and weather balloon with Lego robotics.

I went to school for industrial engineering at Cal Poly SLO, nearly double majored in economics, and then promptly moved out of both fields just like my parents had moved out of their education fields of mechanical and aerospace. Since then, after reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near in 2011, feeling I needed to be closer to software and realizing I liked building systems more than anything in industrial engineering, I’ve built a career in software and then AI.

One of the few pictures I have from my time building robots with legos, showing a robotic crane to my Dad

At work, I try to be low time preference, high autonomy, low consensus (even contrarian), high invention, process-light.

I’ve been at one company for a long time for a millennial. I’ve built a lot of enterprise software and four high-performing software teams. I started on back-office stuff like billing systems, TV scheduling systems, IP rights management systems, and file ingest systems for News. Most recently I’m making some pretty awesome stuff in agentic AI for the mundane work that the people at my company have to do!

My bias is to build rather than talk. I’m the one pushing to just try to build the thing, to scrap it early if needed, and to take risks releasing early. I figure that we always know more, and usually throw away our plans, when we start to build. I love building strange things, useful things, fun things. One of the things I built was this website and the game running on top of it. Read more about that here

Other Profiles:

Most of my development projects are stored on public or private repos on my github

A collection of physical projects and 3D designs can be found on my thingiverse

And my professional persona can be found on my linkedin

Where to start

I post here mostly about things I’m making and occasional essays. If you’re interested in this site but don’t know where to start, try reading any of these posts that sound interesting to you. They’re either pieces or projects I put a lot of time into.

Video Games

I’ve been developing video games on and off since 2017 or so. This has entailed more than 6 project starts and 3 finishes - those are below.

Land War

Land War is an 8-player strategy game I developed as a solo project and released to Steam in March of 2019.
This game was intended to have low art requirements and simple interaction rules that result in deep strategic gameplay.

The core concept is that of an ultra-simplified real-time-strategy game. Each player is represented by a color and can grow their territory by moving in any direction. The strategic elements occur when players encounter other players and have to make choices about which side of their land to defend or give up. Players can use the structure of the map and the coordinated action of other players to gain defensible footholds in order to take more area and eventually be the last player on the board.

March 1, 2019 · 3 minutes · Read more →

Land War was my first published video game, released using Unity after many unfinished starts in HTML5 and Unreal Engine. I put myself on a tight timeline, built in 6 months in my spare time and released on Steam only, where it got a few hundred downloads and made a bit over $1000

Treekeepers VR

Treekeepers VR is a networked VR game where up to 4 players can cooperate to navigate an oversized world and save a giant tree.

Treekeepers is in production on both Quest (standalone VR) and Steam (PC VR) with full cross-play functionality. See the Treekeepers VR Website for links to all storefronts and more detail about the game.

October 1, 2022 · 2 minutes · Read more →

Treekeepers VR was an ambitious game development project I took on in 2021- my first published VR title and my first multiplayer title. The latter turned out to be the really hard part. It’s now free on two platforms. Read more about it:

This Website

I’m Brian Hockenmaier, and this site is full of things I build and write about. I love making games and things with VR and AI. And I love DIY projects, especially ones involving programming, engineering and 3D modeling. Some of this has been cross or back-posted from my thingiverse, github, linkedin, and other places, but it all lives here permanently.

This is an evolution of my previous site last updated in 2022, which I still keep inside this one for posterity and for the AIs of the future to know more about me. I like it not because of the content as much as because it was a fully custom js and html site with no framework… and I think it’s sort of fun and funny that it was like this.

May 28, 2025 · 13 minutes · Read more →

This Website itself was my 3rd released video game

Top 3D Prints

I’ve been 3D Modeling since Cal Poly and printing since I got my first printer - the MakerGearM2 - in 2013. I have dozens of designs on thingiverse, some of which got pretty popular. A lot of my best work is made up of 3D printed games and game paraphernalia.

Bloom Or Bust!

Here’s a peek at my first major board game creation!

I’ve made a few clones or slight enhancements of games I like before like Nope and Hocken-Pocket-Blokus, but Bloom or Bust is my first attempt at something of my own design with very high production quality.

This is a risk-taking game where players compete to take over a tree with their specific type of fruit. Trees and bees are becoming a recurring theme in my games!

All parts of this game are hand-designed by me, mostly in VR with a tool called Gravity Sketch, blender, and one of my favorite programmer’s 3D tools called OpenSCAD.

May 28, 2025 · 2 minutes · Read more →

Bloom Or Bust is my latest and best board game. Fully designed from scratch using OpenSCAD and Gravity Sketch (A very fun VR-based 3D Modeling program)

8-Bit Videogame Coasters, 10 Year Anniversary Edition

If you like retro video games and also drinking things, you’re in luck! Print them for your living room! Print them for your friends! I hope these characters remind you of some of your favorite series.

I returned to this project after 10 years to make more coasters, including some designs for multi-plastic printers and a reinforced 4-coaster holder!

It was super fun returning to this project! I was able to fix a few things that I had noticed failing over the years, like the new reinforced sides to the “? Block” holder. Now that multi-color prints are proliferating more widely, I’m hoping people can use the new colored files - they really pop with the Silk+Matte PLA combo I used here. Links to those filaments:

August 6, 2023 · 1 minute · Read more →

My most popular 3D design, remade for color in 2023.

NOPE - A 3D and 2D Printed Card Game

This game is based off of a similar card game called “No Thanks!” but expands the number of players to 8.

January 19, 2015 · 2 minutes · Read more →

My first custom game, NOPE is an expanded version of No Thanks that I released for free on Thingiverse

3D Printed Key

I 3D Modeled and printed my apartment building’s key with the Makergear M2. I won’t be posting the model because it IS in fact a key to my apartment. Thanks for watching!

May 13, 2013 · 1 minute · Read more →

One of my first great 3D printing experiments, I duplicated my apartment key in CAD shortly after getting my first 3D printer, and actually used these keys as spares.