Games
In the Spring semester of 2009 I took Magy Seif El-Nasr's course on the Theory and Design of Games. Over the course of that semester I was involved in the creation of three very different game prototypes. Each of these went through several iterations, and each is roughly playable (although by no means "complete"). My collaborator, Ben Unterman, is a fellow PhD student at SIAT, and is equally responsible for any good or bad things in any of these prototypes.


The Antastic Machine:



Our first assignment for this class was to take a poorly designed game (about ants escaping from an antlion) and make it better. Ben and I decided to take what had initially been a Flash game, and transform it into a tabletop strategy game. In The Antastic Machine, players represent factions of ant engineers, tasked with gathering resources and constructing an antlion slaying machine. After a set number of turns, the Antlion attacks and the players must pit their creations against the monster in fierce gladiatorial combat. Our goal with this game was to combine the resource management aspects of Settlers of Cataan with the end-game raid coordination of World of Warcraft. Download the Rule Book in .pdf format (18mb)


Death Match, Picasso:




Our second assignment focused on Level Design. For this assignment we created a "Death Match" map in Unreal Tournament III. We decided to challenge ourselves, by taking a cubist painting by Pablo Picasso, and translating the geometry into the game environment in such as way as to reproduce the painting when viewed from above. In addition to wanting to remain as true to the original painting as possible, we also wanted to create an environment with a range of pleasurable strategic affordances for FPS gameplay. The challenge, then, became as much about translating a strictly two-dimensional image into a multi-leveled play environment as it was about making the space "picasso-esque".
Download the map files (requires UT3)


Attack on the Zephyr!



Our final design project for the class was to make a board game. This was a very open ended assignment and so we decided to pick a time and a place in which to set the game. We wanted to do a train themed game, but decided early on that we didn't want to do any track laying or train construction (as in the 18xx style of games) and instead chose to cast the players in the role of bandits trying to rob a train. To add some verisimilitude to our setting, we decided to set the game on a historical train, the California Zephyr. We used the original floorplans as the basis for our board design, and drew on as much of the historical material as possible to flesh out our setting. The resultant game is a fast-paced, easy to learn, romp through the cars of the California Zephyr.
Download the complete rules in .pdf format (14mb)
Download the deck of cards and counters needed to play the game in .pdf format (>1mb)
Download large versions of the game-board, suitable for printing(23mb)

Other Projects
UIST Student Innovation Challenge: A Framework for Expressive Keyboard Gestures

On October 5th, Karen and I participated in the Student Innovation Contest at the 2009 User Interface Software and Technology conference (UIST) in Victoria, BC. Student teams were given about a month to develop a novel use for a pressure sensitive keyboard developed by Microsoft Research, and all the entries were demonstrated and voted upon at the conference. Our project combined theories of movement from theater and dance, and theories of affect from psychology in the creation of a framework from expressive gestures on the keyboard, which we demonstrated in World of Warcraft. More details on our UIST presentation can be found at our blog.


Evolving Darwin's Gaze
Steve DiPaola hired me over the summer to help prepare several videos for his gallery shows at MIT and Cambridge. Evolving Darwin's Gaze is an evolutionary computational artwork that uses genetic programming to "evolve" a population of portraits using a famous painting of Charles Darwin as the "fitness function". These three videos introduce the basics of evolutionary theory and genetic programming, discuss Steve's work on the nature of human creativity, and tell the story of the evolution of these portraits.

The Geek Game Character Generator

In my first semester at SIAT I took IAT 800: Foundations of Computational Art and Design. For the final project, I designed a quiz-based character class test for the Geek themed RPG that Karen and I designed while she was at UCSD. The basic premise was that each question presented the user with two possible solutions to a hypothetical situation. Each of these solutions was associated with a different skill, which were in turn associated with different classes. Depending on how the user answered the questions she was assigned a specific class. While the heuristic for this class assignment was never very robust, the questions and solutions remain some of my favorite geek game related writing to this day. Take the Quiz Here