About

I'm Carl J. Hess — game designer, software engineer, and writer based in West Hartford, CT. I build things for tabletop play and write about why TTRPGs matter.

• Game Designer
• Software Engineer
• TTRPG Writer
• GM & Player

My current focus is Hyperlite — a space adventure TTRPG I've been designing since 2025, built around crew dynamics and the particular physics of starship crews under pressure. I play and GM across a lot of systems, but I keep coming back to designing my own because nothing teaches you a genre like trying to build it yourself.

By day I'm a software engineer with a background in web applications and systems integration. The overlap between software design and game design is bigger than most people expect: both are about modeling complex behavior with simple rules, and both get interesting when real humans touch them.