A game about cities and secret societies, or a secret society about cities and games.I became involved with this secretive ARG project while I was still in grad school, and went to work for them after graduation.. I can’t say much about it, as our work was done under the tenant of “absolute discretion,” but …
A territory control and supply line game built on the HeroCards collectible card game engine. Release Date: Summer 2004 Came complete with two expansions. Best-selling game of the HeroCards line. This was the first game I ever designed, and it introduced me to the thrill of finding elegant solutions to game mechanics. That moment when …
Led design on the fifth installment of the Diner Dash series. Release Date: March 2010 The challenge with this project was how to build an experience that would expand what was possible in the Diner Dash universe while still maintaining the core audience’s engagement with a product they loved. The planning and prototyping phase was …
A different take on the “Dash” genre of time management games, I wrote the majority of the script for the narrative of the game, along with designing and developing many of the characters. Our story revolved around Karma, a can-do girl who discovered that she had inherited property from a mysterious uncle. Her eyes filled …
An in-house project at UCSC, with a lead designer (myself), and engineer (the brilliant Gillian Smith), and a team of undergrad engineers, artists, and even a musician. This was an exciting, experimental project, fusing Gillian’s procedural level generator with my ideas around systemic exploration. Players manipulate the generator itself to build new types of levels …
In Prom Week players had to navigate the cutthroat world of high school politics to land a date for prom. This was an Expressive Intelligence Studio project at UCSC that had a sophisticated mind-model for NPCs, letting them pay attention to the social relationships between other characters. Game Play involved using those mind maps to …
Mystery Play was a week long Alternate Reality Game that I ran twice as my thesis project at UCSC. Release Date: June 2012 In the tradition of MFA projects, it was a woolly, wild experience, where I learned a lot in a short time. The story asked players to interact with twelve mysterious entities through …
