games

DIGITAL / Lead Designer

Word Scramble

At Zynga, I was given the challenge of bringing the excellent Facebook game Scramble to the iPhone and iPod touch. The final product — rapidly developed with a phenomenal team — exceeded internal expectations, and remains one of the top word games on the platform. Word Scramble features a super-competitive live mode, as well as asynchronous challenges against friends, solo play, and the surprisingly fun single-device “Play & Pass” mode. Game data is shared with Facebook, and a friend ladder displays your friends’ top scores.

DIGITAL / Contributing Designer

Café World

My final project at Zynga was the cooking/restaurant simulation Café World, now the fastest growing game in Facebook’s history with five million daily active users within one week of launching. I worked in collaboration with a dedicated group of designers, engineers, artists and producers, without whom this project wouldn’t have been possible.

Chain Factor

While working with area/code in New York City, I contributed to the design of the ARG Primacy (built for the CBS show NUMB3RS), and its casual game offshoot, Chain Factor. The simple flash game was intended to combine the simple arithmetic joys of Sudoku with casual blockbusters like Bejeweled. area/code later took this same design to the iPhone with Drop7, which has been critically acclaimed as one of the best titles available for the platform.

Sharkrunners

During my time at area/code, I also worked on a title for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, writing the majority of the creative copy, as well as contributing to iterative design. Sharkrunners used real-world telemetry data as the basis for its real-time oceanic exploration. Cell phone alerts inform players when their virtual ships are close to real sharks, prompting them to log online and engage in increasingly dangerous observation missions.

NON-DIGITAL / Lead Designer

omg hire me

Oh noes! You’re out of school and now you need to enter the real world! Build a resume and get on those job sites! omg hire me lets you re-live (or live for the first time) all the joy of looking for work during a recession.

Turfy

On the elementary school playground, it’s kill or be killed. Do or die. Win, or go back inside. Compete for control of the jungle gym in Turfy, a “Risky” game of single-territory warfare.

You Have to Lock the Entry!

Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in the world, and as such is the only encyclopedia deserving of its own game [citation needed]. In You Have to Lock the Entry! — the free card game anyone can edit — players rush to complete wiki entries while destroying the efforts and edits of their opponents.

Gygaxian

In March 2008, Brenda Brathwaite issued a challenge to design a game in memory of the late Gary Gygax. Gygaxian is my response to that challenge, an inverted game of Dungeons & Dragons where multiple Dungeon Masters (here called GGs) battle for narratorial control.

myNo

Combining the real-time pattern recognition of Set, the rolling and scoring of Yahtzee, and the fast-paced momentum of Pounce, myNo is a small dice game designed for two to six people, and playable in under 20 minutes.

Petrol Panic

In the not-too-distant future, vacation-bound families hit the highways in their SUVs, hoping to beat the traffic to the holiday hotspot. Along the way, they’ll have to contend with outrageous tolls, and the fluctuating price of gas, which ebbs and flows with the traffic. Petrol Panic is a complete board game, first published over at The Escapist.

Fictionless

Board games are typically about rolling dice and moving, but what if dice rolls could be used for something else? What if you could sell their values for money? That’s the concept behind Fictionless, a tiny board game created for The Escapist. Industry veteran Brenda Brathwaite referred to the game as “a form of design fun I wish more people would embrace, both digitally and non-digitally.” Fictionless’s unique use of dice is more fully developed in Petrol Panic, where rolls signify the current state of traffic.

9am class

No college student likes signing up for a 9am lecture on Monday mornings, but sometimes you just need the credits. It’s a simple enough class, and your only real challenge is remaining conscious. Now published by The Escapist, 9am class is a multiplayer dice game based on the rigors of the academic environment, and the arduous task of keeping one’s eyes open.

The Filler

Just in time for Halloween comes The Filler, a simple game of zombie outbreaks and occupational hazards, played with a standard deck of playing cards. The Filler is the latest game designed for Game Design Friday, my monthly feature over at The Escapist. The full set of rules and a post-design analysis can be found on their site.

ARROWGAMÉ

Exquisite Corpse meets Rock Paper Scissors in this minimalist game of strategy. Two players compete on a folded index card, taking turns drawing rows of arrows, then unfolding the card to see the results of each round. The visual result of each game is a beautiful war-torn space, littered with arrows — an artifact of a battle comprehensible only to those who play. ARROWGAMÉ was originally conceived in June of 2006, and was published as part of my “Game Design Friday” series at The Escapist. Check it out here.

Officeball

Less a proper game, and more a core mechanic, Officeball is designed to be a casual, subtle game of possession played in a, well, office. Competing players vie for control of the “ball,” but can only make a move under the pretense of actual office-related work or communication. Officeball was designed as part of Game Design Friday at The Escapist, and the full rules and post-mortem can be found on their site.

Magic Numbers

A remarkably scalable strategy game of bluffing, Magic Numbers has players rolling dice to accumulate points. The strategy comes in each player being assigned one good number and one evil number, which only he or she knows. Add this to the mechanic of optionally “giving” your roll to another player, and the implicit goal of the game quickly becomes sussing out the other players’ evil numbers, while at the same time psyching out your opponents into giving you their good rolls. Magic Numbers has been published in The Escapist, as the first in a series of non-digital games to be published on the site. Check out the full rules, and post-design writeup, here.

MIXED / older titles

Spectre Academic

Beware the Spectre Academic, a troubled spirit which roams the classrooms of liberal arts colleges, possessing his corporeal peers to gather their school supplies in order to fill his haunted backpack. An experiment in unobtrusive game design, Spectre Academic was originally conceived in September of 2006. The game challenges a room-full of students to perform a subtle yet atypical task during a classroom session without their professor taking notice. Spectre Academic was published in the Fall 2006 issue of Verse Noire. The full set of rules can be found here.

Sqube

In the fall of 2005, I collaborated with James Callender to create a game based informally on the “Tron-esque” mechanic of intersecting vectors. The result was Sqube, an original computer game which featured compelling gameplay, and compelling visuals as a direct product of that gameplay. The player controls a growing line which moves along the surfaces of a three-dimensional cube. Unlike the lightcycles of Tron, intersecting the line is positive and desired behavior, which results in the creation of squares of various colors and sizes, all dependent upon the player’s interaction. Sqube reached a working alpha in one month’s development time, but work on the project has since been suspended. The latest version of Sqube can be downloaded here (Mac OS X only).

Network

Inspired by game conferences, the real world, and the formalities and subtle social nuances of meeting new people, Network challenges players to build up their rolodexes by finding other Networkers and “throwing down” with their game-specific business cards. It’s a massively multiplayer, collectible business card game, intended to be played at site-specific events like conferences and art shows.

eyeDodge

Originally designed as a playable prototype of a more complicated project, eyeDodge has become a full-fledged big game in its own right. Designed and first tested in December of 2006, eyeDodge is based on systems of surveillance, and the infiltration of an environment where your most precious resource is your identity. The infiltrating player must make his way through the surveilled space, collecting bits of data which he must eventually decode. Other players act as cameras, opening and closing their eyes at regular intervals with the hopes of capturing the infiltrator. Photos of eyeDodge in action can be found here.