Practical Portfolio
Honours Project, BA(Hons) Games Design and Production
My practical work has largely focused on narrative, experience, and general game design. Many of these projects were part of my university studies. In my 3rd year, I acted as designer and producer for a team of 8, Cubic Burrito Games. Our game, Light the Waves, is a VR 1st-person tower defence game made over the course of 3 months. In my 4th year, I played a number of roles in our group of 5, Maximum Lunchbox, as we took part in three 3-week-long game jams, each with a specific prompt and challenge. The resulting games include a set of minigames designed for a custom platform, a hidden-role rat-themed card game, and a wave defence game.
In my professional experience, I worked at Yaldi Games from 2023-2024, starting as an intern and working my way up to Narrative Designer on their debut title, Out and About. Since then, I have been working on personal projects, and seeking employment in the games, entertainment, or museum industries.
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Out and About - Yaldi Games
Out and About is a cosy foraging sim, with themes of community, recovering after tragedy, and stewardship of nature. While I started at Yaldi Games on a month-long internship in July 2023, I stayed on and worked my way up to Narrative and Game Designer by the start of January 2024.
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My work varied over the year I spent with Yaldi; I started out helping with QA, bug testing, and documentation, before moving to focus more on research and content creation. By the time of my promotion, my main focus was on narrative design. Between January and August of 2024, I split my time between long-term narrative planning, and iteratively creating first-time-experience demos and vertical slices, for conventions, producer showcases, and pitches.
Maximum Lunchbox
As part of a course in my 4th year of study at Abertay University, I took part in three 3-week-long game jams. Our team, Maximum Lunchbox, was made of 5 game design students. Throughout the semester we each played a variety of roles, the short turn-around time giving us the chance to try out different jobs and specialities.
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For the first jam, we were tasked with creating a game for a custom platform - an outdoor arcade machine built at a local art installation. We made Pirate Hop, a simple game inspired by Frogger that fit the existing theming and mechanics. I assisted with design and QA.
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The prompt for the second jam asked us to create an analogue game where voting was either a key theme or core mechanic - with the intention to raise awareness of alternative voting methods. We created Rat King, a hidden-agenda card game, where players have to vote on policies passed by a rodent government. I led on gameplay design and content creation, assisting with the development of both player roles and policy cards.
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In the final jam, our game was to discuss conflict resolution in public green spaces, with the aim of raising awareness of the various groups that make use of them. Our game was GGG - Gorilla Goat Gardening. In this wave defence, 2-player co-op game you play as a gorilla and a goat, each with their own abilities. You defend a green space from waves of attacking Buddleia, or butterfly bush, a heavily invasive species in the UK. On this project, I dipped my toes into 2D pixel art, and found I really enjoyed it.
Cubic Burrito Games
In my 3rd year, an entire semester was dedicated to the Professional Project - a group project where teams would be given a brief by an industry client, and were tasked with designing and developing a game to meet the client's specifications. Our client, NearLight Studios, gave us the prompt "Hands Off," and required the game be developed for VR. Out of our team of 8 - four game designers, two computer artists, and two programmers, none had previously worked in VR, so this presented an exciting challenge.
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On this project I acted as Team Lead, Producer, and assisted with QA and design. Our game was Light the Waves, a 1st-person arcade shooter. I became practiced in Jira, which we used for project management, scheduling, and bug tracking. I split my time between keeping and updating documentation, QA, and talking with my team - gathering and giving feedback, ensuring they were on track, and managing expectations and motivation.