Bobbi Bones
2D UNITY GAME - APRIL-OCTOBER 2023
Bobbi Bones (or Bobbi Bones' Boss Fight) is a metroidvania boss-rush game in which you swap your limbs and cause chaos to take down the most powerful and evil inmates of the Tome to become the most villainous villain of all! The vertical slice our team is creating pits you against a giant magma toad named Duke Beezle Bufo. Your goal is to ruin his spa day, survive his rampage through his lava-filled domain, and take him down (violently).
This is my first official project working as a Producer, but I have found a knack for it. As of the 1st of September, we are presenting the first act of this level at NZGDC. Up until this point, progress has been surprisingly smooth. I would give all credit to our amazing team, but I have to admit my project management systems are what really kept us on track. Being on a team of 10 people has been a difficult learning curve, but I am lucky to have a passionate team and a research project worth of knowledge to fall back on.
Download Bobbi Bones for free!
Art and Game Assets by Escher Webster
Blink
48HR GAME JAM - MAY 2023
Blink is a horror escape room game where you have to escape the room before it eats you alive. As long as you keep your eyes open, you can hold back its transformation. Just don't blink! We were given the prompt 'Vision' and decided to make an escape room inspired by Rusty Lake games with creepy visuals that complemented one of the artist's photobashing style.
Blink was made alongside one other programmer and two artists for a University club 48-hour Game Jam. I functioned more or less as the director for this game: managing our scope, puzzle designing, bug fixing, publishing the game seconds before the cut-off (as it always is with game jams). Blink is available to download on itch.io, but it is quite difficult and will take multiple tries to beat it.
Game Art by Heidi Scott and Cameron Lawrie
Dying Wishes
TTRPG GAME JAM - DECEMBER 2022
Dying Wishes is a card-based TTRPG system designed for 2-4 players on an adventure in a gritty, low-magic fantasy setting. It is inspired by the idea that the last words a person speaks hold power. When playing, you encounter dangerous foes, strange ruins, and hesitant allies, and you use general actions alongside your Archetype's unique skills to survive as long as you can. Death is inevitable in Dying Wishes, but it means you can create a Blessing or a Curse on your way out.
I managed to catch the last week of the Minimalist TTRPG Jam on itch.io, and created Dying Wishes in three days. The jam encouraged participants to focus only on the mechanics, and refine them so they would flavour a world on their own: "No pictures, no layout, all killer, no filler." This allowed me to dive right into realising this concept of useful death in a role-playing game, but since I only had a few days, it was submitted with no playtesting. I also wanted to include an adventure generation system to play GM-less. If you play Dying Wishes (free on itch.io), let me know!
Art by Ilinx Keene
The Ninth Life
2D UNITY GAME - OCTOBER 2022
The Ninth Life is a side-scroller puzzle game where you play as a witch's familiar who can possess dead animals and use their abilities to explore the metroidvania map. You are a black cat called Nonus who must go out into the Skull Grove to collect ingredients for the Witch’s spell. As a vertical slice, the current game only involves possessing mice to collect skulls, but I intend to continue working on it and fully realise the concept.
This is currently a solo Unity project made for university but entirely driven by passion. I have done programming, level design, a small amount of art and lots of documentation for this game, making it easier for other people to work on it if anyone does join the project. For now I plan on continuing to work on it by myself in my own time. The current build is freely available for Windows on itch.io now!
Art by Ilinx Keene, Game Sprites from various free asset packs
Children in the Mist
CHILDREN'S SHOW PILOT - OCTOBER 2021
"Two siblings are left on a magical island inhabited by creatures from Scottish folklore. The sister must learn to trust her brother and his magic to brave the dangerous creatures corrupted by the Dark One." Children in the Mist is an animated children's show pilot that I worked on as narrative director and a writer in 2021. For our university course, myself and my four team members worked through the pre-production of this pilot, including a full script.
As the narrative director, I formed the team’s ideas into a tangible story and wrote the script. I led brainstorming sessions and was the voice of reason not only with what ideas would make a good story, but also what we could have feasibly created with the animation medium and our skill set. I also worked alongside the director and other writer in creating the script, proofreading, editing, and building upon their concepts.
Art by Kelsey Watson
The Mother Tree
3D UNITY GAME PROTOTYPE - MAY 2021
The Mother Tree is a top-down shooter about protecting the Mother Tree from enemies invading the forest. You play as a druid who is the protector of the forest. You must use your spells to stop the monsters from killing the Mother Tree, and in turn the rest of the forest. As the player, you must balance staying in the centre of the map protecting the Mother Tree, and venturing out into the forest to collect power-ups and draw enemies away.
I made this game in 2021 using Unity over 12 weeks. For it, I programmed a player character that could move, aim, shoot, get hurt and collect powerups, waves of enemies with multiple types of AI, including player tracking and pathfinding through a maze, and a dynamic death system based on the Mother Tree's health. The project was only a Minimum Viable Product, so the visuals and quantity of content is lacking, but it is bug-free, has a reasonable difficulty curve, and is coded in a way to easily allow for future additions.
Gameplay Stills and Footage by Ilinx Keene
Dungeons & Dragons
For those who don't know, Dungeons & Dragons is a Tabletop Role-Playing Game where one player leads the rest of the group through a fantasy adventure. This player is called the Dungeon Master, or DM, and if they have set the game in their own world, there is a lot of preparation that goes into running the game. I am a DM, and have been since 2019, where I have run a "homebrew" campaign nearly every single week.
Being a DM has been invaluable to my development in my creative journey. It has been my outlet for writing, sharing stories, testing ideas, drawing inspiration, and more. What makes planning for D&D unique when compared to writing a book or screenplay is that it requires you to create in pieces and look at the bigger picture. Your players are unpredictable, and the dice are even more so. From here it can be easy to draw the connection to writing for video games.
I use a combination of diagrams (diagrams.net) and knowledge bases (obsidian.md) for my planning. I have also used these tools and skills for university projects.
Campaigns
The Disenchanted
MAY 12 2019 - NOV 21 2021
The Disenchanted was my first campaign. It took place over 8 character levels and two and a half years. Most of the diagrams in the slideshow above are from this campaign. You may also notice most are missing pieces. That is because we cut the campaign short for personal reasons. Overall, the campaign was poorly structured (it was my first after all) but with my planning it was still enjoyable.
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Art by Zephyr Henry.
Candlekeep Mysteries
DEC 5 2021 - JUNE 2022
Candlekeep Mysteries is an adventure module published by Wizards of the Coast that consists of 17 separate adventures that all begin with a mystery surrounding a book. We are played until 6th level in this book, ending on a dramatic fight with a coven of witches. Since this is a published adventure, I didn't have to do much planning for it, but I did have an Obsidian vault for any notes I did have.
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Art by Zephyr Henry.
Favoured by the Stars
JUNE 2022 - PRESENT
My current campaign is Favoured by the Stars, a reboot of sorts of The Disenchanted. Because of this, a lot of my notes from that campaign will be reused, and it will be set in the same place, Shikitsi. We are well into 8th level, and the players have had many run-ins with mind-bending eldritch beings and interweaving plots. Running this game has had some very interesting challenges since it is so personally connected to the characters.