Phillip Zoghbi

About

Phillip Zoghbi

I'm Phillip Zoghbi. I build branded games and interactive installations for hospitality, food, and entertainment brands, and I take them from the first conversation to deployed, working hardware.

How I got here

I didn't start in games. I started in embedded systems, writing automated tests for automotive software at RT-RK (TTTech Auto), flashing firmware and debugging hardware, then spent years across back-end and full-stack development. I even spent a season inside Amadria Park, a Croatian resort, installing and maintaining the networks, POS systems, and cameras that keep its restaurants running.

Since 2019, interactive work has been my focus. I built gamified experiences at Brojka Creative Production, where I worked on projects like Valamar and Jana, and now I run my own studio, ZM5J, where I built the BBT arcade cabinet that kept restaurant customers coming back for months.

It's an unusual route into game development, and it's exactly why my installations hold up in the real world. A branded game has to be worth playing, and it has to survive a public venue all day, unattended, on real hardware. I've spent years on both sides of that.

Foundation: an Associate's in Computer Games & Programming (Lehigh Carbon, USA) and Unity certification.

Business, not just builds

I'm also an MBA student, and on every ZM5J project I own the scope, the contract, and the product decisions, not just the code. You get someone who starts from your business outcome (what a visitor should do, and what that's worth) rather than someone who only builds to spec.

How I work

  • Start from the outcome (what a visitor should do), not the tech.
  • Build for the real world: all day, in public, unattended, on whatever hardware the project needs.
  • One codebase across desktop, mobile, kiosks, and custom hardware.
  • Fixed scope and price once we agree on the outcome. No surprises.

Don't take my word for it

When you're wiring money to one person, you want to know they're real and they ship. So here are the receipts. ZM5J is a registered game studio, based at the BIOS technology incubator in Osijek, Croatia. My development history is public on GitHub at github.com/pzoghbi. Same name, same studio, same code, all of it checkable. Verify any of it before we talk.

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