Category: Design

Golden Loft

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In Golden Loft, you will explore your grandfather’s attic and uncover his fascination with the Golden Ratio. Through this journey, you will learn about the Golden Ratio and Phi. Some of the greatest mathematical minds throughout the ages from the Ancient Greeks to modern day have been entranced by the Golden Ratio and its properties. But this is no boring lecture. Play with various contraptions and curios that your grandfather found in the world and brought back to his attic. Dive into the history of the Fibonacci Numbers and how they got their name, alongside where those numbers appear throughout the world. But most interestingly, you will discover how all of these elements are intertwined and have fascinating relationships with each other, and appear throughout nature, architecture, and art. Play, explore, and learn about the Golden Ratio and Phi in Golden Loft.

This game is available for free on Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, and Oculus GearVR.

This game was created over the course of 3 months with a team of two working full time. The game is designed to teach people about math, without requiring any math or calculations to progress through the experience.

My partner and I inherited this project from another team, furthering their initial concepts and making the game our own. We added more than five times as much content, as well as creating a narrative and tutorial for the game.

For this project, I was in charge of Design, Programming, Research, Writing, Usability, and Sound Design. I ideated and itterated upon every lesson and interactable within the game, as well as implemented and optimized every lesson and interactable. If you would like to see a code sample from this project, please click here.

I also researched Phi, the Golden Ratio, and Fibonacci Numbers extensively, and wrote the dialogue and voice over to condense what I had learned into easily understandable and interesting lines for the player to learn from as they play with various interactables.

Finally, I sourced most of the sounds in the game, as well as editing them to make them appropriate to the context of the game.

Tiny Trees

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Tiny Trees is a competitive tree-building game for 2-4 players where you are a nature spirit trying to become the next Demigod of Trees!

Unlike most board games that lie flat on your table, the trees you grow branch out into the third dimension! Whether you want to relax and creatively grow a tree or focus on the deep-rooted strategy to win, you’ll be creating something you can be proud of from the moment you open the box.

Click here to view our presskit!

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Tiny Trees has been showcased at 4 conventions including Minefaire Houston, Minefaire LA, USC Games Expo, and Indiecade 2018. Tiny Trees was selected as a Indiecade 2018 Finalist!

Tiny Trees also successfully funded on Kickstarter in July 2018, raising over $8.5K from a goal of $5.8K!

Tiny Trees was originally selected as a final project for USC’s cornerstone Game Design Class, where I spearheaded a three-person team in the creative direciton and iteration of mechanics and gameplay.

The game is designed to make players feel proud of what they have created in the process of the game, which led to the creation of a competitive but not adversarial game system.

I have proctored this game in over 70 playtests throughout development, with a focus on delivering upon our user experience goals and easy understanding of our rules. To see an example of the analysis I performed through playtesting, please click here.

Tiny Trees Website

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ShortStacked

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ShortStacked is a couch co-op stealth game where you play as two kids stacked in a trench coat, getting up to comic-worty shenanigans! It’s cute, whimsical, and a little bit chaotic. Actively work with each other to reach your objectives and build a comic-worthy story along the way.

This game is available for FREE on itch!

This game was created over the course of 9 months with a team of about 15 people, and has about 40 minutes of gameplay!

This game was selected to be a showcase game at USC Games Expo 2020!

I was the Lead Designer for this project, and was involved in nearly every facet of the project. However, my largest contributions to the project were in the level design and through creating design documentation for the team.

I designed and iterated every level from the graybox stage to completion, as well as iterated and redesigned the core mechanic. Specifically, the game used to be completely first person, but we shifted it to being completely third person.

For documentation, I updated and maintained the game’s design document that was used as a communication tool between the different teams to better understand the vision of the game. Click here to view the design document.

In addition, I rigged and animated the character model which is used in the final build!

The Trinketeer – 5e Homebrew Class

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The Trinketeer is a custom homebrew class for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, allowing the player to create custom modular trinkets for a large variety of effects. Currently there is only one subclass – the Specialty of Traps – but is formatted for the possibility of expansion. Although the Trinketeer is not a spellcasting class, many of the trinkets can feel like spells or function similarly.

The Specialty of Traps is designed for more cunning individuals who want to add an extra level of strategy and planning to their D&D combats. With the possibility for the player to make custom bear traps, timer traps, wire traps, proximity mines, and small dimensional portals, a clever trap maker will always have a tool at their arsenal.

Although the class is similar in nature to the official artificer, this class is unique enough to warrent it’s own classification, similar to the difference between a wizard and a sorcerer.

The module was created using Homebrewery, and sources for images are in the document, with additional watercolor effect made by myself.

If you would like to download this class and play with it for yourself, click here to view a pdf!

Trapped!

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You all have been living together for at least several weeks. Recently, people started picketing outside your house. More keep coming. They’re all angry. A Mob is forming. Words on the wind. “Kill them.” “Burn the whole thing down.” Survive against The Mob.

Trapped is a one-page tabletop RPG where your primary goal is to survive the ever growing mob. Trapped is an incredibly flexible system that fits into any level of fantasy or time period that uses a unique mechanic to decide the outcome of uncertain events. Instead of rolling dice, you draw cards from a standard deck of playing cards.

Click here to see the RPG for yourself!

This one-page tabletop RPG was designed for a tabletop RPG class, where we had to design an RPG based on a Grimm’s fairy tale. I selected The Owl, which tells a tale of an owl who rested in a barn, but was mistaken for a monster by the farmers. Many try to rid the barn of the foul beast, but none are brave enough to do so. Ultimately the angry mob decides to burn the barn down with the animal inside.

Trapped! plays out from the owl’s perspective, where the angry mob gets ever closer and closer to killing everyone inside. In order to capture the feeling of an uncontrollable angry mob, I created the deck system instead of rolling dice, in order to phisically represent how much time the players have left. The additional element of randomness also adds to the feeling of the angry mob, as they become further enraged for no apparent reason.

I’m particularly proud of the relationship mechanic I created for character creation, where each player determines their relationship with the player on the right. This leads to emergent gameplay, and informs the player how they should be interacting with other person, which is useful when a game shouldn’t last more than an hour or two.

Fool’s Errand

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Fool’s Errand is a card-based dungeon crawler with deckbuilding elements! Explore through multiple dungeons fighting off manical jesters as you continue on a fool’s errand.

This game was created over the course of 4 weeks in April 2020 with a team of 3 people.

For this project, I was both the lead designer of the project, and programmed any aspect of the game that involved the cards.

This prototype was created as an expirement in communication without using any form of text – numbers or letters. I was inspired by traditional playing cards and their design, and made a dungeon crawler with the intention of eventually building in more deck building elements. Additionally, we experimented with discretization, making the game real time rather than turn based as is genre convention for card based games.

This real-time factor made the game interesting and unique, but made the already difficult to understand game even more confusing, where players were getting frustrated.

This project was voted on by a class of 30 to continue development, where we gained another teammate. Over the next three weeks, we focused on refining the core of the game before expanding into new territory, emphasizing usability.

Now the game is at a state where the core gameloop is entertaining, and additional content can now be built out of this core system!

Click here if you would like to see a code sample, and Click here if you would like to play the game for yourself!

HexiDecimal

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HexiDecimal is a fast paced action game, which is a new take on hacking, where you eliminate the floating packets of data while avoiding the firewalls looking to take you out! But be careful – you leave a trail of destruction in your wake and can’t move onto those hexes!

HexiDecimal was created as a prototype in March 2020 within a single week as a team of 2 people.

The project explored mixing discretization and continuous structures, both in the game’s movement and actions taken, where the actions and movement are all very discrete, while all enemy movement is completely continuous.

For this prototype, I came up with the original concept, as well as programmed the main player, camera movement, and all of the particle effects.

Click here for a code sample, and click here if you would like to play the game yourself!

Non-Disclosed Government Contract

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DoD Seal

I developed a Department of Defense virtual reality experience, experienced by over 230 people in a private setting, including high ranking executives, elected government officials and Air Force personnel.

The game experience was made using Unreal Engine 4 over the course of a week, and I was primarily in charge of programming, maintaining build stability, and usability.

For usability, I designed a method for the players to intuitively understand where they could and could not travel, as the percieved space was much larger than the walkable area.

The virtual reality experience “went beyond [the client’s] objectives… [and] raised the bar for all future design reviews…”

Additionally, the experience allowed the client to “get a meeting with an external organization that they have been trying to meet with for several months with no response.”

Going Up

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Going Up is a single player puzzle platformer for the PC where you are a slime trying to escape a steampunk factory!

Gravity is all out of sorts in this factory though, so whenever you let go of a surface, you fall to what you concieve is “up”. However, there is no true up. Will you be able to escape the factory or will you get disoriented and never find your way out?

Click here to download the game to play it for yourself!

This game was selected to be developed as a final project in the University of Southern California’s Introduction to Game Development class.

I spearheaded a two-person team in the ideation and iteration of core mechanics and level design. The levels are designed to create interesting puzzles through a simple set of mechanics. As part of this level design, I also tested the levels to ensure functionality and that they were challanging the player.

I was responsible for over 80% of the programming within Unity, which you can see a code sample here. As part of the project, I designed the stages with usability tutorialization principles to make teaching learning the game’s mechanics fun and engaging while also being educational.

In addition, I created a press kit for this game, which you can see at goingupgame.github.io. The final level of the game has a large jump in difficulty, since it was intended to showcase the complexity possible with the game’s simple set of mechanics.