My 2023 Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) entry was not ranked very highly by players that year; the interface mechanism I built for it was a formal experiment that many found disorienting, and bugs plagued its initial release. Now, after having revised the technology, the story is easier to see, and the systems easier to appreciate. The result, “Out of Scope,” is a thematically complex branching narrative about which forms of love and violence our society condones, and which it condemns. It follows the downfall of the Carnation family, and your effort as one of the family’s star-crossed scions to put […]

In 2023, I was on a team that released an educational game for middle school kids as part of a grant-funded project by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to advertise Fort Stanton Cave, a natural landmark in New Mexico. I was the principal programmer on the Academy project, an adaptation of Ron Lipinski’s Caver Quest simulation for the Fort Stanton Cave Study Project. I created or revised many of the character and prop 3D models and animations, scripted new character controllers, customization, and interactions, implemented new systems such as quizzes, collection minigames, rewards, a generic save and load API, […]

I was commissioned by game designer Thomas Stavlo to prototype a multiplayer client for his deck-building game. The setting is steampunk-meets-Game of Thrones, wherein the player has taken to the air in a crystal-powered airship to defeat his or her rivals through either total domination or by scoring reputation from broadside hits and evading or deflecting blows from pretenders to the throne. The complex game features made for a lot of fun engineering: turn based gameplay across a network; lots of animation; cards that, when played, produce special turns that require choices; support for more than two players; an AI […]

I’ve always loved fantasy maps, many of which are hand drawn or are tailored to look like it. Part of this hand drawn style are clear, but sketchy outlines around objects, and then perhaps a textured fill for shingles on a house, the foliage of a tree, or the running water in a stream. Another frequent element is soft shadows that, even if the map is represented without perspective from above, communicate the depth or height of the terrain or objects in it, and allow for the time of day to change. (Free fantasy map example reference from Jonathan Roberts’s […]

This portfolio makes it fairly plain that I’m interested in both creative writing and creative technology, but my most ardent dream is to bring them together whenever possible. Sometimes it’s a pretty fruitless quest, as the tribulations of luminaries like Chris Crawford, who has dedicated (some would say wasted) his life to do the same. Others, like Emily Short or Andrew Plotkin, have written interactive fiction for years, and even made a career out of it, but in every new work the interface between technology and narrative remains vexing. Authoriality pushes, and interactivity pulls. One of the big challenges for […]

The screens below are from a job for AGM Container Controls, who spend thousands to transport their Ascension line of wheelchair accessibility lifts to trade shows and exhibitions, where they would need to additionally have to be assembled and disassembled. AGM’s technical specialist, Estevan Gregory, had the idea to instead showcase its products in VR, providing a similar experience to potential customers in an environment of their choosing. My modeler friend Danny Adelman and I were contracted to build the experience. I created a generic interactivity system that could be used to control single-input movement controls for even the most […]

Since taking on the game design and game programming classes at Pima Community College, I’ve met a wonderful variety of students, and a few of them have been tremendously talented. In order to better promote enrollment at the college and to celebrate these bedestined aspirants, I created a trailer for last year’s cohort that showcases some of the superb work they created in just over a year. Even the music was composed and sequenced by students. Each year, the graphic intro I created for the trailer would increase in scope with my own skills: For the first trailer, I scripted […]

Reunited with my inestimable partner Chris Hill for a second game jam (after the success of Pyramid Scheme), we set about creating our next experiment with a new process in mind: script-first design. Instead of starting with game mechanics and coating them with story, we decided to try creating the content first and then fashioned a mechanism to leverage it. It was scary not to have a mechanism built in Unity to fill – we put a lot of faith in a fairly new intermediate narrative engine called Ink – but thanks in large part to Chris’s whip-fast coding, the […]

It’s January 2017, the same weekend as the Women’s March protest and the weekend after Donald Trump is sworn into office as president of the USA. The Global Game Jam begins, and this year the theme is “waves.” Me and two other collaborators (Matt Jackson and Rachel Franco) create a game in the spirit of both making waves and finding peace in a dissonant world, called Harmony. The game is about getting in sync with the rhythm of the world around you and obtaining peace in the process. In the game, music plays and two colorful waves sweep across the […]

As Pyramid Scheme begins, you find yourself digging your own grave at gunpoint in the Sonoran Desert. It looks like this is the end for you until your shovel hits an odd object in the dirt: a tiny pyramid, no doubt buried there many millennia before (or perhaps it’s just trash that some tourist dropped here in the nineties). It seems to speak to you, to whisper in your mind, to fill you with the power to… be a life coach! Using your impressive new motivational skills, you convince your would-be killers to trade places with you, and soon you’re […]

TV Tycoon is a game simulation of network television management. You adopt the role of one of several television networks, each of which have different victory conditions and advantages / disadvantages. As the commissioner of that network, you choose how much to spend on new program development, where to schedule your shows on a virtual TV schedule, and whether to cancel or rearrange them based on their performance with different audience demographics. Random events affect your audience’s tastes and can interfere with or assist the ongoing production of your television shows. Detailed data about the performance of your shows and […]

Sun and Moon is the best app for playing Legend of the Five Rings online. It lets you flip, bow, sift, and stack cards with natural gestures, while making it easy to connect to other players and test decks. THE STORY: About this time last year, I created its antecedent for my good friend Ben. Ben got me into the L5R CCG when I was thirteen years old. Those of us inspired by his enthusiasm, however, eventually went separate ways, and playing L5R online has always been a haphazard affair. No longer, I hope! Thanks to encouragement from this coterie, […]

Game of Zones is about the vicissitudes of power in a hierarchical social system wherein only the conniving and the morally destitute may survive. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s a goofy parody of Game of Thrones set in an Apple Store, created in 2013 as tribute to my friend Patrick for his years of kindness as my colleague and manager. In the RPG, you undertake to find the missing code for the manager’s office before the store opens. Talk to your coworkers to unravel the mystery of who locked the door and why, and stumble across in-jokes that anyone […]

In Heaven and Earth, you play an underestimated patsy flung into a position of power in a galactic naval conflict. When you fail to drown, your allegiance is courted by both sides: the religious progeny of mankind, exiled from Earth, and the atheist usurpers who displaced them. Command fleets of customizable ships. Manage their systems in realtime (with pause) on an abstract tactical map. Outflank, use formations, micromanage individual abilities on equipment, earn and spend on outfitting: fight outnumbered and outgunned, but never outwitted. Reveal a rich, literary story about the role of belief systems in a universe where “heaven” […]

You are not yourself. Yourself is someone else, someone comfortable and far away. Someone warm and dry, and safe. Someone sheltered. You are no one, at least no one you know. You have been floating in the ocean for as long as you can remember, hoping to your far away self that the salt water and the seaweed and your sunburnt skin was a dream. But if it is, then maybe you are part of the dream, and will disappear at its merciful end. You have just washed from the cold ocean onto a burning beach that admits no sign […]