Tag: Professional

Alghrab

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Alghrab is a one-of-a-kind alt.ctrl game, where you try to beat an arrogant animatronic crow at its own card game to earn a prophecy! Created with an entirely custom display table that doubles as storage, custom deck of playing cards, and over 200 voice lines, this animatronic crow comes alive to taunt, jeer, and poke fun at the player as they try to push through Alghrab’s web of tricks. With over 1700 combinations of fortunes, what will Alghrab see in your future?

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.

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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Crescendo

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Crescendo is a 2D combat action game, where you conduct a musical world around you through your actions. Travel through an eerie fairy tale world that is teeming with music and battle the monstrous personifications of an orchestra.

This game is available for FREE on itch!

This game was created by a team of 22 over the course of a year, developed completely remotely, with 15-30 minutes of gameplay depending on your success against the enemies! It was also selected to be shown at USC Games Expo 2021!

I was the Lead Designer for this project, and my primary contributions to the team was through Combat Design as well as Documentation. One of the main design constraints and design problems is that this game is centered around its music. So every boss needed to be timed specifically to music, but our team specifically didn’t want this game to be a rhythm game, so the player’s input could enter at any point, but it still had to sound pleasant.

Our design solution to this problem took inspiration from Peter and the Wolf, where each actor on screen has a musical “voice”, each playing the same song, but weaving in and out as the different actors performed certain actions.

I designed and iterated on all three boss fights in the game from the greybox stage to completion. Our combat needed to be slower and more methodical in order to give time for playtesters to identify that a new instrument voice was weaved into the sound.

I also managed and updated the design documentation that was used to communicate between team departments to maintain a similar vision. Click here to view a sample of this design documentation. The diagrams were made by the other designer on Crescendo – Carys Gooi.

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!

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.”