Project Aurora

One of my thesis ideas has passed Pre-Production. This means I have a passing grade for that class and will be allowed to continue to Senior year! Yaaay! Now I can come up with any random thing for the next half of my thesis pre-pro class. (We need to come up with two in the semester.)

The passing idea is based off of magnetism. It's set in the near future where the Earth's magnetic field has weakened and faded away, allowing solar winds and radiation to bombard the surface of the planet.


The player has to maneuver a magnetic ball through an abandoned city and reach a giant machine that can restore the planet's magnetic field.


Once the machine activates however, an intense wave of solar winds enter the atmosphere and destroys the machine. The balls magnetic properties get transferred to the player in this process and they now become the magnet.


A friend of mine, Michale Hosticka, had developed a functional version of the mechanic last year
We worked together to develop the story and concepts, theses are a few of the pieces I created for this project

In the beginning of this project we had an entirely different world and story
that involved a society of robots and an evil corporation.
We abandoned it because it made the project too large for us to handle as a two person team.

Youtube Channel

I have a YouTube channel set up to showcase some of my work. Currently I have the camera fly throughs of two environments I showed in the previous post but more videos will be posted later.

All of these videos are of projects done collaboratively with fellow students. The first is a five man team and the second is a three man team.

The art dump of all art dumps

It's been awhile and it's been busy. Lots of class work with lots of ups and downs. Hard to believe this was just the first semester of Junior year, it felt like an entire year of work. Although a lot of the work I did was lost in the fast paced semester. Let's see what I can gather together.

collaborative project with Michale Hosticka, Clarke Nordhouser, Brian Harries and Linnea Harrison

collaborative project with Michale Hosticka, Clarke Nordhouser, Brian Harries and Linnea Harrison

The Greydell Catastrophe

A few pieces I created for a Dungeons and Dragons game my friend was putting together. I'm usually the Dungeon Master with these games but the tables have turned for me and now I am taking the seat of a player.

Character sheet of my D&D character Kaeden

Card design for spells and abilities to be used as quick reference

The actual printed cards

Map of my friends D&D world

Dig Deep

Character concept for a "Dungeon Master" from Dungeons and Dragons

Paint over of a level design for a class

Illustration depicting mechanics for a small game
that never reached an end in development

This blog has been dead for a while since I forgot about it for so long. Here's a few pieces that I've found when digging through my computer that I figured should go up online. More will come, honest

Game Over

So the mod project I mentioned before is over and all the work is done. It turned out alright, I was trying to take advantage of this situation to learn as much as I could about designing an interesting play experience, which I think I achieved for the most part.

My game is called 'Evicted' because you play as one of the 4 races that have been evicted from the land by the gods because they have become too much of a hassle to deal with. So they are ordered to pack up their things and leave the land. By pack up their things, I mean move all their land into their ships.

Each race is designed to be distinctly different from each other.




The four ships are meant to be pieced together by the players
so that when they are stood up they aren't completely flat.

These are the docks that connect to the main board.
It's the starting area for the players and where they have to bring their land in order to score.
The players slip their boats into that white sliver (area that is cut out in the actual piece) so that it stands upright.

I had turned the idea that Small World was a land into a literal land grab game, in which players need to pieces of land to their ships in order to win. There are 5 different types of land: lakes, swamps, hills, mountains, and forests. On the back of each tile is a number, this number has to deal with how much points the player receives. The cool thing, I think, that emerges is how the map begins to change it's shape and turn into a maze as the game progresses, due to the land being taken by each player.

The winning condition is an odd one, it was inspired by the game Tigris and Euphrates. The winner is decided not by who has the most land by the end, but by who has the most points in their lowest category of land. This means players can't go grab any piece of land, they have to think about which type of land they are in need for to win. The game ends when all the land is gone.

Some other pictures and progress of my designs


Character portraits


Some silhouettes for the final unit pieces.


An example of the process in designing the land tiles


This was what the land was originally going to look like.
9x9 squares with a special zone in which players pick up their victory points


These are some initial sketches for the Elves in an earlier version of the game
that had different types of units with abilities


An early Illustration of the elves.


Originally I was going to have Undead units, but to me it didn't make sense in terms of the back story. The Undead seem like the type that would be more worried about gathering other people as food than gathering land.