Harrisburg University

Global Awareness is both something that is incredibly important to my chosen field of game development, and something that I believe I do a good job of engaging with. Just as with any kind of media, games reflect the world and the maker's views on them, so it only follows that designers should have a strong grasp of current events, history, and any thing else that may play into the narrative, design, or even mechanics of the games that we're making so as to ensure that we are being as respectful and responsible as possible. 

As pictured above, I make a lot of fictional maps- many of them can be seen here. These are for hobbyist reasons, like for my dungeons and dragons worlds, and for professional reasons like for my games and / or supplements for other games. These are a pretty literal example of how Global Awareness plays into my work. Obviously knowledge of cultures, conflicts, mythology, history, ect., is incredibly useful in making convincing maps (and more importantly the worlds they represent) while also basically being, in my opinion, an ethical necessity. It's inevitable that we will take design influence from real people, real cultures, real nations, and real events, to build our fictional ones and its vitally important to ensure that we have an accurate understanding of what we're drawing from, as well as being careful and respectful about our implementation.

In a meta sense Global Awareness is important as well; Game Development is very much an international field. Teams will often have many people of different cultures, and often teams in different parts of the world will be collaborating on a project. It also applies to my personal endeavor as a solo developer, as I need to understand things like regulations on what can be included in games in different areas of the world, safety and privacy laws, and many more things that vary from place to place.

Critical Thinking is, of course, very important to game design because it is important to basically everything. Personally, I think my critical thinking abilities are most on display when troubleshooting a problem like a game mechanic or user friction point that requires an elegant solution. This is, however, very difficult to show with an artifact. Other areas of design where critical thinking comes into the forefront is in prototyping and learning a new tool. 

Root Vegetables, a game I made during the 2023 Global Game Jam, is a great example of both of these. I, over the course of 48 hours, took a theme (Roots) and some modifiers (Including Multiplayer, Using Ukraine's national colors) and turned it into a working prototype of a multiplayer party game. It was also the first time I had ever made a multiplayer game, so I needed to read the documentation for, and create, and entire peer to peer multiplayer system in the first day before I even started working on the assets or any polish. I also used my skills in Adobe Illustrator to make some basic sprites (one of which is partially pictured above). The game can be played here. 

Civic Engagement is something that I'm very personally interested in. I've been out canvassing, phone banking, working at food banks, and generally keeping astride of local governance and politics. As much as I do involve myself in it, Civic Engagement is something that I have brought very little of into my games, although I'm interested in the idea of games as political statements, propaganda, or even just expressionist art that sees civics as a target. 

The closest I've come to this myself is my micro-game: A Poem About Life, which is an art game about living in the current system. A short video of that is attached above, but the primary artifact I'll present here is an assignment I did regarding walkable cities for a science class in HU, you can read that here. It's a topic I am very interested in, and I've been thinking about the possibility of making a small city builder game that actually incorporates mechanics that reflect walkability and not just focusing on car centric transport.

Regardless of whether or not that particular idea goes anywhere, I have no doubt that my interest in civics will bleed into my work and I will continue to engage with the real systems locally as well.

I consider myself to be fairly good at learning new tools, researching, and synthesizing information, which all of course comes back to Information Literacy. In my Independent Project 1 at HU I laid the groundwork for a narrative focused rogue-like game that I went on to develop a prototype for in Project 2. The prototype is called Psychopomp and can be found here, or some gameplay is visible above. The premise of the game focuses on afterlives and spirit guides, which began with a great deal of research into various cultures and mythology so that I could start to build a world and characters that were drawn from real myths and stories while remaining respectful to the source material. 

To that end I compiled a massive research document on mythology, and did an analysis of 3 games that were narrative focused, which I think synthesized into a plan for my own development. This was then followed up with a huge world design document and the eventual prototype itself (both here). Game design documents are also a huge part of my work, and are a great example of practicing information literacy. I'm currently working on a card game with another solo developer, and I've created a 30 some odd document that I'll add here and in my portfolio once the information is clear to share. 

Ethics are very important to me, especially with how they tie into game design. I am of the opinion that a great deal of game design practices are unethical, be they microtransactions aimed at children, or addictive or even abusive systems. So I make it a point to take a step back from time to time and ensure that I can ethically justify everything in my project. For me, games are first and foremost art, and to that end I endeavor to ensure that my art is always ethical before the thought of profit even enters the occasion.

During my time at Harrisburg University, I've taken a dedicated ethics class and written plenty of papers about my thoughts on various ethical systems and situations. One such paper is available here. There have also been industry ethics mixed in with my game design theory classes, and basic ethics in some of the general education classes.

Linked above is a youtube video of one of my prototypes I built while learning Unity. All of the assets, including the sound effects and music, I went through the effort of either making myself, or getting express permission from the owners to use. Not because the game is ever going to be published, it certainly isn't, but just as practice in the department of ethical use of other people's work.

As far as Entrepreneurship goes, my wealth of experience is relatively small, but it's always growing. In 2023 I founded my own Game Development company: Grimoire Games. Currently I'm focused on getting my first card game Rhyme Scheme published, which has included communicating with dozens of publishers, going to interviews, demonstrating the game, pitching the game, going to PAX Unplugged and talking to hundreds of people on the floor for advice, pitching the game, playtesting, and more. This was a huge labor of communication and professionalism, and continues to be something that I am learning as I go but undoubtedly growing in skill with. 

I've also worked for indie studio Molecular Jig Games as a game designer on the game strategic repair protocol, which required teamwork and critical thinking on a small team where every member makes a huge impact. I largely worked on level design, although I was also involved in developing mechanics and broader game design. 

Linked above is a pitch video for my card game Rhyme Scheme. I built this to attach to my sell sheet when I took the game to PAX Unplugged to pitch to publishers, although the game itself began as an HU project a year before. Oral communication is not my strong suit, but this is a skill that I've been working on developing and practicing, especially with voiceover style videos like this which are extremely useful in conveying information about my game projects.

For an example of my work in written communication, there are a few relevant artifacts on the site. Here you can find a few pieces of Interactive Fiction that I wrote as part of a game design class. This is obviously a creative work, but communication still plays a big part, seeing as its an entirely text based 'game' and the player's imagination needs to match up with the design. Here, on the page for my prototype of a roguelike game called Psychopomp, you can find an example of a Game Design Document that I wrote, as well as a World Design Document, both meant to be practice for making similar documents while working on teams and communicating the features, needs, and feel of the game. Here is my list of One Page RPGs, a kind of tabletop roleplaying game that's meant to be distilled down to a single page of rules for a quick pick up and play experience. It's imperative, in these sorts of projects, to maintain a high density of information while keeping it accessible and easy to read, which of course comes back again to communication. 

All in all, I'd say that communication is the core competency, and skill generally, that I've practiced the most while at Harrisburg University and broadly in my endeavors in game development. It's incredibly important to the team effort of building a game, and even on solo development projects one needs to be able to communicate through the game to the player. It is my hope that what I've learned so far is only the very beginning of the growth of my communication abilities.

This is an infographic about how to play a game I conceptualized called Amalgam. The graphic itself was created by Lucas Spiecier, a fellow HU student and game designer. We've been collaborating on the game for a few months now, with him focusing on art assets, while I focus on documentation, and we both work together on mechanics and content. The two of us have also collaborated before, with him doing some effects for my Psychopomp prototype and I doing some writing for the game he made during his Project 2. I've worked with a small studio called Molecular Jig games as well, which was also an excellent collaborative experience. 

Besides communication, I would say that teamwork and collaboration is the most important Core Competency for game design. I'm always looking for opportunities to expand my skills and make new connections. In the future I hope to use my skills with teamwork and collaboration to bridge the gap between various types of game developers on any given team, like making sure the artists and programmers are on the same page for example.