Kijulee
High-school student · Seoul, South Korea
Applying · Class of 2027
Quiet is not the opposite of brave.
I make games, 3D characters and paintings. Every one of them began as something I was too shy to do, and turned into a way for someone else to try it.
Made with
- Blender
- Unity
- Watercolour
- Face tracking
- Retopology
About myself.
Hi, I am Kijulee, a student from Seocho-gu, Seoul who builds games and 3D characters, paints, and runs a small community for Arsenal supporters who never post.
Projects
Games, 3D characters, a watercolour and a business. On a list they look unrelated; they are all the same attempt.
Soccer FriendsI wanted to play football after watching Arsenal, realised I had nobody to call, and built myself a friend out of polygons instead.
Emoticon MaskMaking a face in front of other people is one of the hardest things I do. So I built a 3D mask and gave it my expressions instead.
Penalty KickA watercolour about two kinds of suffocation: the penalty you have to face, and the air we have made.
Vertical BloomA game about climbing out of a grey city, built out of the exact feeling of wanting to speak and not managing it.What I work on
Four things, and one reason underneath all of them.
01
Games that make you do the brave thing
First-person, obstacle-led, usually about walking into a place you would rather avoid.
02
3D characters and masks
Sculpting, retopology, rigging, and mapping my own expressions onto something that is not my face.
03
Painting, slowly
Watercolour, where you get one pass at the wash and cannot take the moment back.
04
Building Gunner Up
Product and community design for supporters who feel everything and say none of it.
Reading log
I read to find out how other people solved the thing I am stuck on. These are the notes I keep afterwards.
Spotify PlayA book about the app I use every day, read while I was trying to build one and had no idea how a service earns its place in somebody’s routine.How Community Becomes a Brand’s WeaponIt stopped treating community as a marketing channel and started treating it as the way a brand exists at all. That reframing is most of what Gunner Up is now.Stop OverthinkingI think too much before I do anything. I read a book about exactly that, hoping it would get a plan out of my head and into the world.1984A novel about a world where thinking is the dangerous act. The frightening part is not the surveillance, it is how normal everyone finds it.The business
A project that stopped being a project.
Gunner Up · founded 2025
A quieter room for Arsenal supporters
After a match I would sit there for a moment. The game was over, but something felt unfinished. I had reactions, thoughts, emotions, and nowhere for any of it to go — not because there were no spaces, but because none of them felt right for someone like me.
Role
Founder, designer, everything else
For
Fans who watch every minute and never post
Status
In build — product and community design
Questions I get asked
Mostly by teachers, occasionally by my parents.
Why do all your games make the player walk somewhere frightening?
Because that is the part I wanted to practise. Reading about courage did nothing for me; having to move through a corridor, a mountain path or a grey city until I reached the end did. If a player finishes one of them with slightly more nerve than they started with, the game worked.
Computer Science or Sports Management — which one?
Both, if I can. Every project here runs because somebody wrote the rules that let it run, and Gunner Up taught me that a club is not eleven players but millions of people deciding whether they feel included. One is how you build the system; the other is who it is for.
Is Gunner Up a real business?
Yes. It is small, it is in build, and I have thrown away more of it than I have kept. The business part is not the code — it is deciding what a quiet supporter needs before deciding what to ship.
Do you make everything yourself?
The modelling, retopology, game logic, painting and product design, yes. I use AI to refine a concept sketch when it saves me an evening, and I say so in the write-up when I do.
What are you doing next?
A first-person game with no name yet, where the player walks through rooms made out of things I have been holding onto. The ending is meant to stay unresolved.
Vertical BloomA game about climbing out of a grey city, built out of the exact feeling of wanting to speak and not managing it.Post MatchA first-person game where the player walks through my own head. The ending is deliberately unresolved.
Mountain TigerA first-person obstacle game on the road to the old state examination. You are a pig, the mountain is full of tigers, and the exam is at the top.
Surviving SchoolA first-person maze game in which the maze is a school. It is built out of things that actually happened to me.
The Shy RunnerA 2D side-scrolling runner about deciding to get fit along the Han River, and about every snack that gets in the way.Let us talk.
Admissions officers, teachers, Arsenal supporters, and anyone who has ever rehearsed a sentence before saying it. One line is enough.