KEEP IT TOGETHER
Overview
"Keep It Together" is a rules-light horror-comedy tabletop role-playing game in which players embody sentient zombies who must navigate a not-so-zombie-friendly world, all while constantly falling apart and learning how to put themselves back together again.
Roles
As the team's game designer, co-writer, and editor, I concepted design pillars, core world-building elements, and mechanics, as well as helped compose the game's text (ensuring that rules both were clearly/concisely described and fit within the document's illustrations).
THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Overview
"The Neighborhood" is an interactive installation that is being built for the Fred Rogers Center in Latrobe, Pennsylvania (the birthplace of the man behind the iconic red sweater: Mister Rogers).
Drawing on Fred's Middlebury College commencement address (in which he urges audience members to take a minute and think about the people who have "smiled you into smiling, talked you into talking, sung you into singing, loved you into loving"), this experience enables guests to collaboratively create a neighborhood based on memories of individuals who have positively impacted their lives.
Roles
As one of our team's experience designers, I set design pillars and goals, co-designed our experience's overall structure and flow, designed and outlined two of the four mini-interactions contained within the experience, and aided in both setting up and running playtesting sessions (with a focus on documenting playtester behavior and feedback).
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Additionally, I worked as the team's sound designer, creating sound effects for each of our interactions by employing a combination of Audacity and Logic-based custom samplers.
CITY OF STARS
Overview
"City of Stars" is a mixed media mobile app built to supplement a future walk of fame located in downtown Pittsburgh.
By scanning each star-shaped plaque on the walk, guests can discover interesting aspects of inductees' lives and careers that they might not have known about prior to their visit, learn about inductees' varied connections to the Steel City, browse through selections of related works and media, and even take selfies with each celebrity on the walk. Finally, guests can leave their own mark on the walk of fame by creating and placing their very own AR star (which they can also take selfies with).
Roles
As the team's content designer, I researched and distilled sets of facts concerning aspects of walk of fame honorees' lives. I then playtested those facts (in part through online surveys) to see which ones felt most interesting and/or pleasantly surprising. From there, I crafted all of our app's written content and sourced all of our app's audiovisual content, striking balances of focus between personal and iconic moments of individuals' lives while simultaneously contextualizing their past existence within physical spaces that walk of fame visitors might have visited/been in themselves.
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I also worked as one of our team's experience designers, helping to prototype and structure the app's user journey, as well as concept the specific features users would encounter within that journey.
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Finally, I handled sound design for the app, providing sound effects for the animated transition that brings up an honoree's entry upon scanning their respective star plaque.
STERBUHKS
Overview
"Sterbuhks" is a game in which players take on the role of a coffee shop cashier who is entrusted with the (occasionally fraught) task of writing customers' names on cups.
Roles
As the team's game designer, programmer, and sound designer, I was responsible for concepting mechanics and prototyping them in Unity, implementing art assets and animations, and both creating and implementing sound effects.
WHAT'S THE RUB?
Overview
"What's the Rub?" is a storytelling game (designed mainly for partners) about taking the everyday aches and pains we accumulate over the course of a day and turning them into something new and magical and brave.
Players take turns giving each other massages; the player receiving the message determines where they would like to be messaged, and as the massager begins, they recount the tale of how that particular part of the other player's body became sore/stiff/tense (utilizing decks of cards detailing locations, characters, and verbs to use as dramatic anchor points or extra drops of inspiration).
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This game was designed over the course of a month for technology/healthcare company Philips, as part of a design challenge centered around creating games that tackle sleep-related issues.
Roles
As one of the team's game designers, I conducted and documented preliminary analyses identifying the root problem we wanted our game to solve (i.e. players who have trouble sharing beds with their partners still wanting to experience the intimate closeness of bed-sharing), what change we wanted to instill in our players (i.e. changing partners' belief/feeling that sleeping apart means that they're not together), and what was preventing players from undergoing that change.
Additionally, I helped concept and document game rules (including what changed from iteration to iteration and why), as well as record playtester behavior and feedback.
ROOTIN' AROUND!
Overview
"Rootin' Around!" is a cooperative three-player relay race-like game in which players take turns crawling through a trellis while blindfolded and prompting the currently blindfolded player into retrieving particular kinds of produce as they crawl through (without outright naming the vegetable or fruit in question).
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The game was built over the course of a month as part of the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens' Homegrown initiative.
Roles
As one of the team's game designers, I conducted and documented preliminary analyses identifying the root problem we wanted our game to solve (i.e. individuals backing out of community gardening due to either a lack of immediate feedback from their gardening endeavors or inexperience with collaboration within in community garden setting), what change we wanted to instill in our players (i.e. inviting players to both immediately perceive the fruits of their future labors and get comfortable with communicating amongst a set of teammates), and what was preventing players from undergoing that change.
Additionally, I helped concept and document game rules (including what changed from iteration to iteration and why), as well as record playtester behavior and feedback.
SPACE BRAWL
Overview
"Space Brawl" is a competitive four-player game in which players must duke it out across uncharted regions of space over resources with which to expand their spaceship fleets and decimate their opponent's motherships.
Roles
As one of the team's game designers, I helped prototype and playtest mechanics, aided in documenting playtester behavior and feedback, and conducted a postmortem analysis of our team's process. Additionally, I handled fabrication for the physical portion of "Space Brawl," laser-cutting and assembling all of the game's pieces.
SHAFTED!
Overview
"Shafted!" is a competitive two-player board game in which each player takes on the role of a dwarf who has returned to their ancestral mine to retrieve riches containing incredible power, only to find that another dwarf (i.e. the other player) is about to beat them to it!
As the project's game designer, I concepted and documented mechanics, designed and constructed the game's board, and both conducted and documented playtests (as well as iterations made after each playtest).
PARKA
Overview
"Parka" is a 2.5D survival adventure game that I designed and built using Python and Pygame, in which players must trek through the snow-covered wilderness to reach a house in the distance before freezing or starving to death.
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The game was created to evoke some of the core feelings induced by anxiety; in particular, "Parka" (by pushing players to constantly move ahead and forage for food through its mechanics while embodying a meditative/minimal audiovisual aesthetic) focuses on the juxtaposition of panicking about one's impending doom despite the tranquility of one's surroundings.