Engine: Unity – C#, Arduino – C++
Summary: An alternative controller card game where players try to earn a fortune by beating the crow, showcased at alt.ctrl.GDC 2022

• Designed, programmed, and built an animatronic fortune-telling crow, utilizing C++ for the arduino controller and C# within Unity
• Showcased as part of the alt.ctrl.GDC booth at GDC 2022 and the Big Bear Film Festival 2025
• Directed a voice actor for the recording of over 300 unique voice lines

Alghrab is a one-of-a-kind alt.ctrl game that I showcased at alt.ctrl.GDC in 2022, and the Big Bear Film Festival 2025, where you try to beat an arrogant animatronic crow at its own card game to earn a prophecy!

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Alghrab was created as an entirely solo project over the course of 8 months, with a voice actor hired later on in the development process to voice the crow.

I was inspired by the phrase “haunt an object”, where you take an ordinary object and breathe life into it as though a ghost was inhabiting the selected object. Alghrab started as a cheap halloween prop, that I stripped apart and augmented with brand new features and custom components.

The first version of Alghrab was a simple interactive fortune telling machince, since I knew that crows naturally played into mysticism and omens. However, I am extremely skeptical about any type of fortune telling or mysticism, so my solution was to create fortunes, but were fundamentally based off of facts about crows. This gave the fortunes a unique flavoring that can only be felt with this game, and inspired a lot of the bird’s personality and behavior.

From there, I took another look at the design, and constructed a simple card game based around detecting the crow’s lies, inspired by word games like Green Glass Door, while maintaining the fortunes and personality for the crow that had been developed.