Jingle Bells, Batman Smells remediates the holiday song beloved by children and the puerile at heart culturally illuminated as an interactive narrative work for the Advanced Stories platform.

The Advanced Stories engine had received a last-minute feature update three days before the Digital Media graduate program's Fall Demo Day. The new engine build could support SWF files, but we didn't yet have a game story that implemented the feature.

I made Jingle Bells, Batman Smells in those three days before Demo Day specifically to fill this void. The authoring tool development had only just begun, so I wrote the story ASML by hand in Smultron. Creating the art assets consumed most of the time available before Demo Day (of course).

The demo that resulted is a raucous parody of the television interpretation of the Caped Crusader and company. The player can chose to frame the Boy Wonder as a louche slacker, an earnest overacheiver, or a forgetful ditz. The engine tracks the responses and choses subsequent scenes based on the given values for that play-through. The SWFs add animation and sound to the experience, leading to a conclusion of cacophonic chaos that would make The Joker proud.

Seriously, it's that obnoxious. (I'd like to blame the end of semester sleep deprivation, but that might be just a shade ingenuous.)

Download the game.

Download the ASML source code for the game.

The Wierd of Heorat is a text adventure based on the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, and the mythos devloped from the work of H.P. Lovecraft. The graphic style and soundtrack focus the gameplay in the player's imagination, enabling a satisfying game experience that is not predicated on technological standards. These design parameters also result in a game that can be played by a wider pool of players; the test-based nature of the game makes it accessible by text-to-speech clients for visually impaired players.


The player enters a world where s/he is unsure who the PC (Player Character) is or why s/he is there. The persona of the PC unfolds gradually, as part of the game's mystery.

The Wierd of Heorat is a game of discovery, of environment, mystery, and character. Although it uses a static text-based interface design, the game functions as a virtual environment that manifests in the imagination of the player through text and aural stimuli.

The narrative employs a classic Lovecraftian structure and a setting that emphasizes atmosphere and psychological tension. True to the genre, a deranged scholar plays a critical role in the action, and a town full of eccentric, vaguely sinister characters assist and confound the PC in the search for the truth.

Play the Flash game. (Opens in a new window.)

Download the design doc.

Olivia's Room was the content arm of the TUI3D (Tanglible User Interfaces for 3D) machinima project studio at Georgia Tech's SynLab and DWIG (Digital World and Image Group). TUI3D's research focused on the barriers to entry for machinima production, as well as the limited expressive capabilities of the available tools.

I developed a background story, character study and room blueprints as a demonstration environment for the hardware and software our group developed. These resources played an important part in the art direction to inspire and direct the 3D artists working on the toys and other models for the environment, to be implemented using the Unreal Tournament engine.

As Art Director, I also developed demo scripts with interactive audio to be used when presenting the project at conferences and meetings. The audio came from Golden Age radio shows in the public domain. This extended the absent girl's personality into the space, enabling the room to act as an expressive character. The toys and radio plays reflect Olivia's adventurous spirit, strong even in its absence. The environmental design of the room interior conveys a nostalgic sense of security and safety, haunted by the wartime danger lurking outside in the London night.

Download the background story.

Download a sample performance script.