Design Portfolio
This is a selection of game design documents I’ve created which demonstrate my ability to design a cohesive game experience and to clearly communicate the design through well-organized and appropriately styled documentation. In each, my goal was to design complementary mechanics, tones, and themes that all work together to serve the overall vision of the game. Additionally, with a few exceptions, I created all of the art seen in the documents.
Keeper of the Trees
This is the game design document that served as the basis of the capstone game I am currently working on. Originally, it was my submission for the annual “Game Design Document Shootout”, a competition that producers at FIEA participate in each year, where our submissions are reviewed and ranked by industry veterans. It not only won 1st place for the year’s competition, it also tied our professor for the best-scoring submission in the history of FIEA.
While the ideas presented in the document have been iterated on and evolved as we’ve worked on it for capstone, having this design as the basis for our game has allowed the team to easily share a common vision and iterate accordingly, with mechanics, art assets, and level designs that feel cohesive. The majority of the mechanics I originally designed exist in the game’s current form, and my original character art was the main inspiration for the final character design.
Robots On the Range
This was my submission for the “White Elephant” design assignment, in which the producers participated in a game of White Elephant using randomly generated constraints consisting of a genre, a target audience, a narrative setting, and a tone word. The constraint I ended up with was a turn-based tactics game set in a dystopia, with a swaggering tone and targeted towards rednecks.
Aglow
The constraint for this assignment was to design a game that didn’t utilize health points, or an analog of health points, in any way. Since HP (or at least some form of it) is such a ubiquitous concept in games, it was initially quite difficult to think outside of that box. However, once I managed to break out of the shell, I came to the realization that the established traditions in games (including things like experience points, player levels, and skill trees) have created sort of inherent constraints that, in many cases, limit the potential for games to do something truly unique in exchange for including familiar mechanics in the current zeitgeist of gaming.
The end result was a horror strategy game in which the player manipulates light and shadows in order to survive a mansion crawling with vicious monsters. The primary theme of the game is “fear of the unknown”, and eliminating health as a mechanic actually worked really well in making the enemies vastly more powerful than the player, which reinforced the horror.
Wavelength
As a musician with experience in audio engineering, this design is particularly special to me. In this game, players interact with the world around them using sound waves, and the mechanics are meant to emulate the real-world physics of sound, as well as some concepts of music production and audio engineering.
I ended up developing a prototype of this design as part of a tech design “Gauntlet” assignment. You can see a gameplay video and further info about its development here.