The casual multiplayer game Imprimatur was developed with Dave Roberts (programming) and Chris Langston (documentation, user experience) as part of a special topics course on multiplayer game design. My work on the project concentrated on developing compelling mechanics and the interaction and visual design for this strategic word game.

The turn-based gameplay looks to Rummy 500 and dominoes as well as the venerable Scr*bble. We started out with round playing pieces, but in prototype testing players found the shape more difficult to parse. The grid in the board exists merely for helping players keep the playing area tidy; it has no function in scoring. The gameplay leverages the space in three dimensions - players can place letters horizontally, vertically, and on the z-axis using existing letters.

A player must play a letter each turn, although it does not have to make a word. Thus, the letters can be used as defensive and offensive weapons against other players. The shared playing area is simultaneously a collaborative social space and a contested battelground.

In user testing and at LCC's biannual Demo Day, Imprimatur proved extremely "sticky." (One player, a tenured professor, kept playing despite her needing to leave to teach a class.)

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Reacher the Epistemological Creature incorporates emergence as a mechanic by leveraging certain procedural qualities within the Mockingbird toolset.

The Mockingbird platform abstracts a variety of core game mechanics as "actions." These patterns can be adjusted and assigned to objects in the environment in realtime. Although not marketed as such, these features make the platform a pretty useful tool for rapid prototyping.

The goal of this casual, Flash-based game is to earn points by eating as many chipmunks as possible within the time limit. Rare chipmunk spawns also give extra time or a few seconds of invincibility. The player must avoid being killed by the acorns that shoot from the logs.

Emergence manifests in the interplay of the chipmunks and the environment. Their abilty to move the logs, a procedural side effect caused by an assigned action, results in a stochastically changing gamespace and a higher degree of complexity and challenge for the player. The chipmunks are transformed from passive objects to be hunted into a defense force that becomes more dangerous as their numbers (and potential value to the player) increase.

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Sheep Amuck! remediates sheep herding as a casual game whose mechanics philosophically mirror the parent activity being simulated.
Sheep herding requires the dog to organize that which does not wish to be organized. The real-life mechanic of controlling sheep employs the sheeps' resistence to the dogs as a Hegelian dialectic. The dog uses the sheep's aversion to being herded in order to herd them.

Sheep Amuck! translates this Hegelian mechanic as game logic scripted on the dog and sheep actors.

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Mermaids' Garden distills the design ethos and aesthetics of the more complex Mermaids MMOG into a casual gameplay experience.
The holistic design of the MMOG focuses on collaborative exploration and building as well as more competitive activities like gathering and killing. Mermaids' Garden translates these values into casusal gameplay that evokes the MMOG world's sense of wonder and retains its plastic style of play.

Mermaids' Garden uses art from the MMOG to recreate the luminous undersea environment. The gesture-based mechanic from the MMOG is simplified but retains the basic tactile idiom.

Swimming through the maze, the player touches pods, which then spawn colorful anemones. Scoring and the time limit satisfy achievement- or competition-oriented players. The player can move the pods to create a unique anemone garden with each session, adding replay value.