Project Type: design
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The Archipelago
The Archipelago is a quiet narrative game about brewing tea: making what we can from the ruins of what we loved. The Archipelago is available on Steam, Android, and itch.io. Once, this place was one island, a city floating in the sky. Thirty years ago it broke apart into dozens of pieces. Children lost their…
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The Garrison and the Gardiner
The Garrison and the Gardiner is a two-player roleplaying game in which you stage a conversation between the Garrison Creek, a buried river that runs through downtown Toronto, and the Gardiner Expressway, an elevated highway that has shaped the development of the city since it was built in the 1950s. The game is meant to…
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Harvest
Harvest is a web-based grid puzzle game in which players tend to a community garden and choose between supporting their artistic neighbourhood or reaping individual benefits. Players are at first encouraged to plant neat, segregated rows of purebred flowers, for which they receive awards and accolades from bureaucratic officials. But if they instead mix and…
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The Faceless City
The Faceless City is a short, Flash-like game in which you play as a monstrous curse who steals faces from the inhabitants of a city. I created this game in April 2021 as part of the first Toronto Comic Arts Festival Comics X Games Jam, in collaboration with artist Erica Lee. I programmed this game…
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The Shukaku Game
The Shukaku Game is a short puzzle game for two players in which you brew a cup of tea and transform to accommodate its flavours. Players take on the role of Shukaku, a Tanuki who masquerades as a human monk in order to serve delicious tea. The Shukaku game combines puzzle, roleplaying and taste-based mechanics…
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Rendezvous
Rendezvous is a two-player oneshot tabletop RPG designed as part of the 2019 200 Word RPG Challenge. I created it with my partner, Andrew Tran, to play during a period of long distance. Rendezvous was named one of only 37 finalists for the 2019 competition. The full game is below, but you can also find…
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Pigeonheart
Pigeonheart is a short turn-based grid strategy game for 2-4 players. Players are pigeons competing to build nests and incubate eggs on limited rooftop space. The game boasts randomly-generated spreads and cute pigeon artwork, and can be learned and played within fifteen minutes. It can be hard to find quick, fun strategy games for two…
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Windowpane
In late 2018 I was invited to participate in Meditations, a collection of daily microgames by indie devs assembled by Jupiter Hadley and Rami Ismail. Each microgame would create a five minute-long meditative experience related to the day on which it was released. I chose March 28th. On March 28th, 2018, I took an important…
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One Hour Worldbuilders
You can purchase a Print and Play copy of One Hour Worldbuilders on DriveThruRPG here or a physical copy on Gumroad here! As part of my work at the City University of Hong Kong researching worldbuilding, I examined games and rule structures designed to help people collaboratively build worlds. I couldn’t find any worldbuilding games…
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Puzzle Party Project
As part of my work as a Research Assistant at the MIT Game Lab, I developed several puzzle chains for a puzzle-themed party with over two hundred guests at a tech company in Cambridge, MA. Each chain featured three to four puzzles united by a theme (for example, number puzzles or grid-based puzzles) and a…
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Death and the Maiden
Death and the Maiden is a browser-based game made in p5.js over the course of a few months in 2018. The player controls a giant skeleton hovering over a woman, whom it must protect from danger in the form of fireballs that threaten to kill her. It began as an excuse to improve my spriting…
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Space Pitch: A Co-operative Sci-fi Narrative Building Card Game
Space Pitch is a co-operative narrative building sci-fi card game. Players work together to place and order plot points involving randomized characters, with the goal of making a coherent science fiction story. I designed this game independently for a course on Interactive Narrative at MIT. You can find all of the assets for the game…
Kaelan 