First Person Platformer

A hacked renderer shows a 1D perspective projection of a platform game from the avatar's perspective. Perceptual cues such as atmospheric perspective (also known as distance fog) and visual allusions to classic video games aid the player's comprehension of the space.

First Person Platformer was included in Other Worlds, an exhibition on the psychogeography of game space, as part of Vector Game Art Festival in Toronto in February 2013.

With music by David Renshaw and using the Flixel library by Adam Atomic. Play it online here. (More images...)

Bent Wire Automata

Photo by Matt Mets

Article on bent wire automata for the 29th issue of Make Magazine, co-written with Matt Mets.

Clothing for Orciny

A design fiction proposal to ease navigation of the urban condition described in China Miéville's novel The City & the City. In the geographically intertwined cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, it is a major crime to cross the border, or even to admit to the existence of the city on the other side. Each city has distinctive mannerisms and aesthetic traditions, and citizenship and "political location" are as much determined by conformity to the city's norm as they are by physical location. I propose a costume for traveling between cities as easily as walking. Clothing for Orciny was exhibited at the Detroit Design Festival in September 2011 as part of the Border Town project. (More images...)

Visual Identity for Border Town

A series of images of iconic border cities. As a unified visual theme for the Border Town project, these icons were used on a website, on printed signage, and on buttons, as well as being featured in an article at The Atlantic. (More images...)

/games

instamatique.com/games is a growing collection of short experimental games.

Contraband

Visual design for Contraband, a two player card game written by David Rusak in which smugglers and border guards vie for control of an international border crossing. The cards and mat are designed to be distributed as digital files and printed inexpensively. Contraband was exhibited at the Detroit Design Festival in September 2011 as part of the Border Town project. For the exhibition edition, the mat design was hand screen printed onto muslin. (More images...)

Ditter

Photo by Dominic Dagradi

Ditter is a telegraph key that posts to Twitter. The project uses an Arduino microcontroller and was a collaboration with Jason C. Reed, who wrote the morse code parser. Ditter was shown at 937 Liberty as part of the Rossum's shows "Robot Resolution" and "Signal to Noise Patio," for Pittsburgh First Night and a Gallery Crawl in the Cultural District, respectively. You can read Ditter's posts (some of which are much more coherent than the others, naturally) at twitter.com/ditter. (More images...)

Ockey

Ockey is a two-player game for the iPad, created by Ognid; I did all of the visual design and collaborated on the game design. For more information, see its listing on the App Store. (More images...)

Byzantine Perspective

The opening screen of Byzantine Perspective in Spatterlight

Byzantine Perspective is a work of interactive fiction that was submitted to the 2009 Interactive Fiction Competition.

It took ninth place overall out of twenty-four entered games and tied for third place in the "Miss Congeniality" (authors' choice) category. It also won the 2009 XYZZY Award for Best Individual Puzzle. More information, including links to reviews and critiques from the wonderful and international interactive fiction community, can be found at its IFWiki page -- my personal favorite is Emily Short's review for Jay Is Games.

Byzantine Perspective was written in Inform 7. You can download its zcode file (playable on any interpreter with Blorb support) here, or play it online via the Parchment interpreter here. The map feelie is recommended to any players who do not explicitly desire a more challenging experience; it can be downloaded here. (More images...)

Interactive Fiction Quickstart Card

This is one side of a postcard given out at the Penny Arcade Expo East in March 2010 as part of a public outreach program by the People's Republic of Interactive Fiction. The card is a reference for many of the most common commands encountered by players of interactive fiction in a convenient postcard-sized format. The text is by IF visionary Andrew Plotkin.

A PDF version of the card can be found here; it can also be found, along with various other less faithful formats, at the PR-IF website. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Cyborg Spyglass

Photo by Dominic Dagradi

Gel frames mounted on a servo powered by Arduino, which dynamically filter light. Cyborg Spyglass was shown as part of the student robotic art show Mashings at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers gallery and at the Carnegie Science Center, both as part of Robot 250 in Summer 2008.

Gorget for Botticelli's Venus

Photo by Vincent Zeng

Investment-cast aluminum jewelry.

Halftone Dress

Photo by Vincent Zeng

Formalwear with a laser-cut hem: an elaborate ploy to avoid the most boring part of dressmaking. (More images...)