Awake
FMV Project | Solo Developer | SPRING 2023
Heart of the cards
Unity based card game | Product owner | FALL 2025
The Mysterious Murder of Thomas Monroe
Text based | Solo Developer | fall 2024
Heart of the Cards was such a fun and informative experience for me as a designer. It was one of my first times being a leader for the team when it came to the direction of the game and I can definitely look back and see how some of my missteps affected development. It taught me a lot of lessons about effective communication and trying to meet people where they are at. A lot of time towards the end was spent finding the best way for our different roles and departments to communicate with each other to keep everyone on the same page and pushed towards the same common goal.It sounds kind of negative, but I did actually really enjoy my time with HoTC and it really is a game I’m proud of. A lot of people came up to me during playtesting to say just how much they enjoyed the idea and thought it was funny and creative and I’m so in awe of what me and my team were able to accomplish over the course of that semester.
FMV was a genre I had learned about that semester and became very interested in, as it acted as a crossing over point between film and video games, which are two mediums of storytelling I quite enjoy. I had also spent that time frame being very fascinated with movies like Skinamarink and the book House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.It’s a somewhat surreal and personal project, my biggest successes being in the overall environment and ambience of being awake when it feels like the rest of the world is away in the land of dreams. Looking back, I was new at using the FMV software, Stornaway, and if I were to revisit this project again I would look to expand upon it by introducing some more game-y concepts, like more impactful choices and maybe even some conditional branches.
Mysterious Murder was a seminar project I had started because I wanted something really aesthetics heavy with a focus on narrative. I had eventually landed on a murder mystery set back in the 1920’s after spending my whole summer listening to my sister talk about The Great Gatsby after she read it in class. What made this project so much fun to me was the amount of research and immersion I got to experience. I would spend a lot of my days listening to Agatha Christie’s books or watching movies of the same genre. The coolest character across everything I watched or heard was always the detective and I really wanted the player to get to experience that same kind of fantasy.The main way I wanted to go about this was by making the cast of characters as in-depth as interesting as possible so the player actually wanted to follow all of the leads and figure out the complex dynamics between each character. I think that this half succeeded. The characters were a lot of fun and a lot of my classmates really enjoyed them but I think the endgame and physical clues should have been improved. Some of this was because of my inexperience in Twine at the time and what was possible, but since then I’ve done a lot of messing around in the engine and pushing it to its limits. This would definitely be a fun project to revisit in the future and take another, pardon my pun, stab at.
