Ghost City
Ghost City is a dark, single-player strategy role-playing game. The player represents a squad leader within an ancient order of monster hunters. They assemble and guide their party to exorcize a haunted city, one building at a time.
Though I've done much of this project's core development on my own, I've had invaluable support from a group of five additional co-developers—including project management and design aid from my partner on Team Squamous.
To date, we have a fully playable prototype using placeholder graphics, videos—built in the engine—representing our visual target, an assortment of concept art, and a detailed game design document.
Rombo
Rombo is a narrative-driven, sandbox action-adventure. The prototype currently features most core gameplay, including mining, questing, farming, inventory management, and a save/load system.
Rombo was initially developed by two people, including myself. It currently has the support of the five-person Black Heart Games. I am responsible for engineering, tech art, and occasional art and animation.
Castaway Town
Castaway Town expands on ideas from my earlier Gods & Monsters project.
My intention with this solo endeavor was to create gameplay inspired by old-school Shin Megami Tensei, Rogue, and Final Fantasy Tactics set in a surreal, low-fantasy world. I made three iterations of the prototype, each focusing on different game elements. Each demo features A* pathfinding, modular characters and environments in a complex RPG system, and flexible dialog, input, and notification UI.
Pandora Chicken
Pandora Chicken is the working title for a hybrid shoot 'em up/beat 'em up developed by a team of four. I focused on engineering the shoot 'em up portion. I customized Unity's built-in 2D map editor to create the levels; the game is constructed with modularity in mind so that its levels can be slotted into and around the beat 'em up sequences. The art is entirely temp.
Townies
I've worked on a few potential TOWNIES follow-ups over the years. 2022's version saw me use custom shaders, forced frame rate, and other tricks to achieve an aesthetic that I felt respected the original HyperCard project while being made in a modern engine and using 3D graphics.
Pizza Delivery
On the heels of Lab Rat, my partner and I worked on a Paper Boy-inspired game in which you deliver pizza, upgrade your vehicle, smash property and cause chaos, and eventually fight aliens.
Mixed Reality Project
I created similar effects for two concurrent projects at Grab: an unreleased AR project and the VR game, Final Space: The Rescue. The effects had to be highly optimized to maintain a good frame rate on their respective platforms.
Adventure
Adventure prototypes Zelda-like gameplay on mobile devices. I focused on transitioning to touch screen without sacrificing game feel—as well as keeping the game easily customizable; level maps were created in Tiled and converted to 3D in the engine. I eventually reused the game's characters and world in The Forgotten King.
Carmilla
In the mid 2010s, I binge-read as many vampire classics as I could and sketched out a game that encompassed all of them. The Carmilla prototype is an action-sim that incorporates tabletop- and Symphony of the Night-style gameplay. This project was a solo endeavor. I spent most of my time iterating on game design and experimenting with different visual styles in Unity.
Fish
The concept in Fish is that you swim with the school or be eaten. I implemented gyroscope input, and I achieved my desired look using a combination of cloth physics and post-processing.
Gods & Monsters
Gods & Monsters began with the idea: “What if Legend of Grimrock, but Shin Megami Tensei?” I used the project as an opportunity to learn about runtime map generation, sprite normal maps, and post-processing effects.
Hedge Witch
Hedge Witch prototypes the combat in a JRPG-card battler. The demo supports both desktop and mobile. It features deck-building gameplay with dozens of cards, a unique “balance” game mechanic, a flexible and robust UI, online multiplayer with crossplay, and a single-player mode. My inspiration was Dominion crossed with Pokémon, by way of Level-5. I did the design and engineering, levereging Unity's UNet.
Narwhal
This Out of this World-like tech demo was built by a four-person team. I was in charge of player input, physics, and enemy behavior.
RPG
This was a fully functional JRPG prototype, optimized for play on touch screens. It featured a 3D world map, quest system, battle system, branching dialog, and inventory.
Quest
I used Quest to prototype polished navigation and basic combat for a cinematic platformer. The demo features a dynamic, data-driven animation system, ragdoll-esque character setup, and smooth, intuitive controls. This was a follow-up to a 2005 prototype I made in Power Game Factory.
Ériu
Ériu was my final project at Hampshire College. My high-minded goal was to create a freeform adventure game bound by the tenets of Irish folklore, such that whatever choices the player made, their story would end up feeling like something out of myth. To put it another way, I intended to create an open-world, “you can do anything” Elder Scrolls-style game—themed around Irish history and mythology—by myself—in the early 2000s—and in just one year. It was a stretch. I didn't finish the game; I did manage to create a working demo and give a decent presentation.