Professional Work
My game design work tends to focus on exploring and developing systems, particularly the kind that interact with and enhance a game's narrative. My media of choice include video games, board games, and interactive fiction gamebooks. I pay particular attention to interrogating the conventions of the medium, exploring what is generally taken for granted, and twisting that to help drive the story.
My illustration work lately has mostly been black and white line art for games and books.
My focus as a professor is on teaching video game development. This is also one focus of my research, and the other revolves around discoveries made when trying to answer questions while developing games.
What Lies Beyond the Standing Stone
This short gamebook was made for the 2023/2024 Lindenbaum Prize Competition. It’s a science-fiction/fantasy story inspired by those of the early 1980s. My primary focus for this was storytelling with emotional impact. This work won a Merit Award.
Awakening Aboard the Anastasia
Awakening Aboard the Anastasia is a horror/science-fiction gamebook that was made for the 2022/2023 Lindenbaum Prize Competition. In this work, I explored using orphaned passages to make a promise to the reader and structuring the choices to give a sense of urgency. I also experimented with what ‘winning’ means in a horror gamebook. This work won a Commendation Award.
Happy Fun Activity Book
This was my entry for the first Lindenbaum Prize competition. It’s not a cursed book at all. Why would you even ask that?
Jupe (2024)
This illustration will appear in the second volume of the 2024 Lone Wolf Anthology. Jupe was made to blend my own style with that of some of the original Lone Wolf illustrators. I wanted to include the one horse staring straight into the 'camera' as an homage to those old Gary Chalk drawings from the early Lone Wolf gamebooks.
Illustrations for Tenebrus (2023-2024)
This is a collage of some of the artwork created for the upcoming board game Tenebrus. I will be providing artwork for the cards, tiles, box, and manual.
Harrowing Adventures
Harrowing Adventures is an multiplayer interactive fiction adventure from 4th Wall Games. Development on this project was discontinued during the pandemic (despite Nazis still needing punching).
Untitled Pixel Art Dungeon Crawler
I'm currently working on an "modern retro-style old-school dungeon crawler". Here's what that means for me and this project:
Old-school dungeon crawler: A game in which a single player controls an adventuring party navigating an environment. The player views the game from a first-person perspective and movement is confined to a grid. There is a single overarching story, and gameplay consists of navigating mazes, solving puzzles, and overcoming monsters and traps.
Retro-style: A video game style popular in the past which was defined, in large part, by limitations of the technology of the time. In this case, I'm simulating 3D through 2D pixel art sprite sheets.
Modern: This describes aspects of games made possible by improved hardware and software, developments in design, and evolving player expectations. I'm looking at balancing bespoke and procedural content, using shaders to help me to surprising things with pixels, incorporate UX improvements in games, and to just take a more contemporary and inclusive approach to world building, encounter design, and narrative creation.
Images and demos are coming soon.
St. Edward's University Mini-Portfolios
The Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities encourages the creation of Mini-Portfolios where we analyze some aspect of a class or assignment in-depth each semester.
Re-Imagining Early GameMaker Assignments in Game Design Studio 1
In 2023, I devised a new series of assignments to address a problem in Game Design Studio 1 (GDS1). The problem was that students weren't able to focus on design until relatively late in the course, because they were focusing on learning the tools. GDS1 has to both introduce students to working in a professional game engine and designing video games in 2D, so I developed an assignment to help them do both.
Re-Re-Imagining Early GameMaker Assignments in Game Design Studio 1
My experiment the previous year had failed, but it showed some potential. In this portfolio, I analyze what went wrong and make appropriate corrections. The outcomes from these changes were what I had been hoping for previously. I presented these results at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) conference in February of 2024.
Physics Publications
In my previous academic life, I was a physicist. Here are my academic publications from that time.