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
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.
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.
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.
NON-GAMES / Video
Simulation with Time Lapse
This 2006 video project was exhibited at AGM09: under_ctrl, an art/media exhibition which ran January 15-25, 2009 in Derby, England. From the exhibit programme:
“Simulation with Time Lapse”, 2006, film is an artifact of malfunction in its most literal sense: the recording deck corrupts the video feed; the camera activates its “simulation” mode further destroying footage; the equipment itself was stolen after recording ceased, leaving behind only the tape as evidence – failed surveillance of a benign act. Coupled with the distorted and haunting music of Swedish 8-bit artist goto80, “Simulation with Time Lapse” challenges the viewer to commit Apophenia: an act by which the mind seeks to derive order from noise.