During my senior year of undergrad, as a part of a four person team consisting of a programmer and three artists, I prototyped a deck-building card game about electricity production and carbon emissions. The goal of the game is to produce and sell energy to upgrade infrastructure and eventually reach a threshold of wealth before the other players, all while dealing with, or not, the pollution that results from producing the energy in the first place.

The game was iterated upon over the course of multiple playtests. Initially, the game experimented with the idea of the game not being fun to play to support the lesson that polluting the planet for a profit is a bad thing. In practice, we found that if the game is not any fun, no one will play it and thus the lesson won’t even have a chance to be learnt. Changes were made to make the game tolerable, while still attempting to make the players struggle with how their play was affecting the simulated environment.

Escape to Planet Earth was a point and click puzzle game I worked on for my capstone game group project class during my senior year undergrad. Working in a team of four, two programmers and two artists, we developed the game using the agile development method where we added new features to the game in multiple two week sprints. I was the Game Design Lead for the team, and I created and balanced a number of the puzzles in the game.

Derailed was an infinite runner type of mobile game where the player places different track pieces to avoid crashing the train into obstacles, move the train in the direction of gold collectibles, or deliver the gold to various stations. All the while, train will slowly start to move faster and the player must speed up with it to prevent the train from derailing. I worked on this game in 2014 during the summer before my senior year of high school as a part of a five person team while I attended Carnegie Mellon University’s National High School Game Academy six-week summer program. For a time after release, the game was available on the Apple App store and the Google Play store, but the page for it appears to have been removed since then.