Game Design projects
Urban legends: Crimes & Commedia - 2024 - 2025 (CURRENT WORK IN PROGRESS)
Role - Lead Designer
Urban Legends: Crimes & Commedia is a beat ‘em up brawler where the player fights through hordes of enemies and save the city from the gang of the Commedia Del’Arte. This is the project I am currently pouring my soul into and while the game is yet to look as polished as the team desires, we have been iterating its design to be as best as it can be. There have already been so many unique and enjoyable challenges such as figuring out the color palette for the background so it doesn’t clash with the character, or designing an entire upgrade system in order to keep the experience of the game as fluid as possible. Updates will be posted as new versions are published.
Underneath their covers - 2024
Role - Lead Designer/Narrative
Underneath Their Covers was made for a university game jam based around the theme of “reading.” Our small group had already decided on doing a visual novel before the theme was announced and we tried to implement that theme by making a game where the player gets to “check out” personifications of book genres. Many of the challenges of this project solely came from the limited time of a game jam and the fact that I had yet to write a full visual novel before. I came up with the idea that you had to go around the library and search for each personified genre’s “loose pages” and then you could answer questions based off of them in order to get their ending. This massively helped with the character writing due to each page being about the character and their internal conflict. Each of them felt as though they were lacking some sort of belonging and every character’s arc ties back to that core theme. Once we had the character’s figured out and the core developed, the rest was smooth sailing and Underneath Their Covers was the winner of the game jam.
Last To Survive - 2023
Role - Game/UX Designer
Last To Survive was my first real foray into creating user interfaces for games and I hold the way the UI ties into the narrative with great pride. The player is the last survivor of a disaster on a space shuttle and needs to save themselves from the alien life-form that eats away at their body. Many of the challenges were figuring out how to create a stylish UI which fit the MS-DOS point and click adventure pastiche I was going for. Overall, the point and click gameplay adds a lot to the narrative as the player is free to click around and figure out the mystery for themselves or be lead along on an intriguing story.
WISH UPON A STAR - 2024
Role - Lead Designer/Narrative
Wish Upon a Star was a game made for a university game jam. It started with all of us landing on doing a visual novel that would fit the theme and the artists got to choose the aspects of their characters who would then be implemented. Because we wanted the player to end up with one of the characters, I created a relationship tracking system in which certain responses added or subtracted an amount of points based on the response to the player’s relationship score with that character. It was very fun to design and gave me a simple way to have some sort of outline for writing each scene in the game. This helped our team reach the deadline as most of the writing came down to working around setting up and playing out particular responses with each scene making up a portion of each character’s character arc.
CHeese and blood - 2023
Role - Lead Game Designer
Cheese and Blood is by far one of the game projects I am proudest of. It was made in order to teach players about how the nature of war accelerates with propaganda and every piece of the game goes back to that theme. Initially, it is disguised as a silly mouse game. Players create pieces of “propaganda” about opposing mouse armies which can influence trackers which track resources of their societies. Each round, an event card flips over that drastically affects those trackers. After round three, each round players read fake accounts of people mortified by the war, learning the harrowing stories of these mice as the game goes on. The entire feel of the game shifts as the war accelerates with each round and the objective of the game becomes not to outplay your opponent, but merely to survive. This game was surprisingly effective with players and it was immediately understood that what they did in the beginning of the game lead to its end. Like war, the only real way to win is not to play.
