USC GAMES SOPHOMORE
MECHANIC DESIGN + GAME RESEARCH

Click on the gallery's images to explore my featured projects.

I'm Anik, or AMP, an undergraduate student pursuing a BFA in Game Development and Interactive Design at the University of Southern California. I started with an interest in games research (particularly for educational and health games), which evolved into a more specific interest in the intersection of game design and psychology.My interests include
mechanic and system design, game balancing, and experimental game design. I'm passionate about games for STEM education and mental health as well. Alongside focusing on game design, I'm also a digital artist, animator, classically trained singer, and programmer.I want to create experiences that let people form their own relationships with and draw their own meaning out of.

A collection of personal, commissioned, and gift pieces.

DERAILED

Journey through a colorful, surreal subway system and help the people you meet along the way in this dreamlike adventure inspired by Tati's Playtime.

This game was created as our final walking simulator project in CTIN 289/290 during our first year of university. I collaborated with another designer/programmer to design and implement game systems, and an artist to design the in-game environments. In addition, I updated the design document during the development of the game, documenting what each level would appear as according to our experience goals.

BLINDSIGHTED

Escape superhell - your infinitely looping, black and white limbo of torment - using only your muzzle flash and some flares to see the demonic amalgamations launching towards you.

I wrote an overall level design philosophy based on fear, linearity, and movement, and designed 3 of the 5 in-game stage layouts. Additionally, I illustrated UI icons and the game's splash art.The game placed 5th in gameplay and 10th overall out of 74 entries in the 2022 Black and White game jam.

Minecraft+Chemistry
study

Minecraft Education Edition’s Ability to Create an Effective and Engaging Learning Experience

As part of the AP Research course, I conducted a study on Minecraft Education Edition's applications for high-school chemistry learning. Over the course of the year, this involved creating a Minecraft map based on past game-based education research, recruiting playtesters for the map, observing how they learned through the map, and documenting the results. The study was published in the Journal of Student Research and has been cited 6 times as of December 2023.

Panja, A., & Berge, J. (2021). Minecraft Education Edition’s Ability to Create an Effective and Engaging Learning Experience. Journal of Student Research, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.47611/jsrhs.v10i2.1697

CORE

Travel through time to save the present in a sci-fi magical girl puzzle platformer.

A design document/potential pitch presentation of a 2D platformer and puzzle game inspired by Hindu mythology and futuristic technology. Provides proof of concept, character and enemy design, and an outline for a full game.

DRESSCODE

Style to the max and form relationships with other players and characters in Vanaguard, a dystopian society where every conflict is settled by designers and their robot models in intense fashion battles!

A pitch presentation + proof of concept for a competitive dress-up MMO game, created over the course of 3 months.

TIME TRAPPED

Manipulate the maze's tiles before it's too late in order to escape its trap! Sabotage your friends and hit each of the maze's switches to win.

In a team of 3, I modded the German children’s game Up the River to create a strategy-based maze manipulation racing
game in one week. I designed and balanced the main mechanic, as well as and handled game documentation and playtesting.In the game, players take turns using cards to rotate and flip double-sided tiles to create paths around the maze. They must pass through their 3 opponents' clock-shaped markers and safely return to their base tile in order to win.

ISO EXASTRIA

On an excursion to an uncharted section of space, your crew stumbles upon an abandoned and desolate starship : the Iso Exastria.When exploring, you find fragments of a relic - a map used by the ship's former crew.Work together to repair the map and get closer to solving the mystery of the Iso Exastria.

Within the scope of 3 months, I designed and built a board game based on the feeling of curiosity. I designed the game system, created all graphics, and conducted playtests.Each player took turns drawing and playing cards that allowed them to shuffle and flip the tiles around, managing their own and collective resources to eventually piece together the map.

THE MAZE

You are trapped in a dark, hostile maze, with nothing but even more hostile light bullets to guide your way. Shoot a path through the darkness and avoid your projectiles, dive in face first to reveal walls, use your memory of the maze to navigate, or anything else! The choice is up to you.

A game I created for the DigiPen Intro to Game Design course through the Washington Network for Innovative Careers in Summer 2018.All design and art were created by me, and all sound was taken from a library.
The development of this game was the first time I consistently used a text-based programming language, and much of the programming was done with assistance from the instructors. If I were to remake this project with my current programming and design abilities, I would adjust the difficulty in the beginning, allow for the player to fully rotate their character, and have the bullets disappear eventually, along with tweaks to art and level designs, all to create a more balanced and enjoyable experience.

Explore the dying breaths of the virtual world you grew up in.

12 started as a 2-week design exercise in evoking emotion through gameplay, and evolved into a 5+ week final project for a class. You, the player, are logging into Doodlandia, a virtual world where your drawings are brought to life by a magical clocktower. However, the servers shut down soon, and you must say your last goodbyes before the clock strikes 12 and the magic disappears.

I handled UI design and programming, most of the game's art and environment, narrative, and supplementary programming. This was a heavily personal project for both of us, and most large design and narrative choices were made jointly.We had both recently played PRINCESS INTERNET CAFE's Running Back to You, a game with a very similar premise. Narratively and thematically, the game is very similar. Much of this was unintentional, but as we were trying to convey the same/very similar scenario through 12, it has many elements in common. However, our experiences had largely been in kids MMOs, such as Club Penguin and Fer.al, which had shut down when we were younger, which we also took a lot of inspiration from. As per the assignment, our goals were to evoke a specific emotion. We chose loss, specifically the loss of childhood, and reflecting on it as an adult.

DESIGN + DIRECTION

12 plays out like this:
The player logs into and spawns at Clocktower Island, the hubworld and last remaining location of the Virtual World game, Doodlandia. They meet a few NPCs who tell them the game is shutting down, and has until the clock strikes 12 to explore the island and learn about the world. Near the end of the game, one of the players' friends logs on, and the player can visit their home and meet them there to have one last conversation as the game shuts off. The player is kicked out to the log in screen, and is given an error message saying Doodlandia has shut down, thanking them for playing.

Initially, our core loop was centered around a list of daily tasks that the player would never have the time to finish. Our intention with the tasks was that the game’s timer would end before the player would complete all of them and have a satisfying resolution. However, after playtesting, we realized wandering around and talking to NPCs resonated with players, and gave them the intended emotion of loss in a way tasks wouldn’t. This loss was due to a loss of community and a world that was built by many people, not necessarily through the game itself.

ART DIRECTION + THEMING

UI

For the UI, I took inspiration from the in-your-face UI often seen in kids' MMOs, specifically Animal Jam. I wanted the focus to be on the clock at all times, as a reminder to the player that they had limited time.I also created the loading screen to emulate those found in MMOs, but also intended it as a tutorial - the player can click the arrows on the side to get "hints" on how to play the game.Through repeatedly playtesting 12, I learned a lot about designing UI and how to make something accessible while pushing aesthetics.


ENVIRONMENT

To save time making assets, we decided to create a 3D environment and combine assets from poly.pizza and Sketchfab.
I put together the environment, taking inspiration mainly from Fer.al's fantastical forest environments.

I used a lot of craft supplies, crystals, and fantasy trees. I wanted the world to look familiar, but not entirely - something that would appear in a glorified memory. I also sized up and down many models, creating an environment where the player would feel both big and small.
The island starts out in a paradoxical night when the sun is still out and everything is bright, and the player's home ends with bright patterned skies in a night scene. My intention was to make it feel like the player was falling asleep into a dream.


NARRATIVE

The overall narrative of 12 was created between both of us. We were inspired by our own experiences and what we saw in online communities we were in around the time of MMO shutdowns.
Playtesters also resonated with the Clocktower, so we leaned into the emotions it evoked.Swirlcat, the friend you can meet near the end of the game, was initially represented by the player character's image. In accordance with our themes of childhood loss, they're supposed to represent your childhood self.

I created over 60 dialogue nodes for the characters we sourced from others, and tracked their implementation through spreadsheets.

POSTMORTEM

Both of us grew up playing virtual world games that later shut down. For me, it was mainly Disney Fairies Pixie Hollow, and later Fer.al. Looking back, these games didn’t have much to do, but the community in them and the memories we made together stuck in my mind. Those memories were specific to a time – as a kid, even though I knew they were just games, and maybe not even good ones, they felt like such powerful and open worlds. As a 6-16 year old, I met strangers who I ended up being close with for hours, only to lose them when we both logged off, but also made some of my closest friends after bonding over the loss of these worlds.I played a lot of Animal Jam as inspiration for 12. It's one of the only kids Virtual World games that is still online, and something I noticed specifically was that despite the game still being there, everything felt so different from when I was a kid. The game itself hadn’t changed much since like. 2015 but the people did. When playtesting in class, our SA mentioned the experience we were conveying through 12 wasn’t tied to a specific generation – people, and the relationships you have with them are huge parts of what spaces and communities are, and when those people are gone, so is the community.My other inspiration was the shutdown of Pixie Hollow – I was 9 when it happened and too sad to play the game after the announcement, but I watched a lot of videos people took of the game’s last moments. The servers were more crowded than I remember them ever being, and people talked about saving the game somehow, especially when the servers were still up past the scheduled shutdown time. But if the shutdown happened today, it probably wouldn’t have been little kids, and instead be adults or older teenagers grieving their childhood. I tried to imagine what it would’ve been like if it happened today for 12.Ultimately, 12 is a game about growing up and looking back at the magic of childhood and spaces created through play before they fade away. No matter how much you try to return to them, they’ll keep changing until there’s nothing left, and there is never enough time to save all your memories. You can't go home if home doesn't exist anymore.
The ideal next step would be to create that place again for the next generation, in the form of our own MMO, but the space for those games seems to be long gone. I hope it comes back someday, and I hope I can be part of that.

Both of us grew up playing virtual world games that later shut down. For me, it was mainly Disney Fairies Pixie Hollow, and later Fer.al. Looking back, these games didn’t have much to do, but the community in them and the memories we made together stuck in my mind. Those memories were specific to a time – as a kid, even though I knew they were just games, and maybe not even good ones, they felt like such powerful and open worlds. As a 6-16 year old, I met strangers who I ended up being close with for hours, only to lose them when we both logged off, but also made some of my closest friends after bonding over the loss of these worlds.I played a lot of Animal Jam as inspiration for 12. It's one of the only kids Virtual World games that is still online, and something I noticed specifically was that despite the game still being there, everything felt so different from when I was a kid. The game itself hadn’t changed much since like. 2015 but the people did. When playtesting in class, our SA mentioned the experience we were conveying through 12 wasn’t tied to a specific generation – people, and the relationships you have with them are huge parts of what spaces and communities are, and when those people are gone, so is the community.My other inspiration was the shutdown of Pixie Hollow – I was 9 when it happened and too sad to play the game after the announcement, but I watched a lot of videos people took of the game’s last moments. The servers were more crowded than I remember them ever being, and people talked about saving the game somehow, especially when the servers were still up past the scheduled shutdown time. But if the shutdown happened today, it probably wouldn’t have been little kids, and instead be adults or older teenagers grieving their childhood. I tried to imagine what it would’ve been like if it happened today for 12.Ultimately, 12 is a game about growing up and looking back at the magic of childhood and spaces created through play before they fade away. No matter how much you try to return to them, they’ll keep changing until there’s nothing left, and there is never enough time to save all your memories. You can't go home if home doesn't exist anymore.
The ideal next step would be to create that place again for the next generation, in the form of our own MMO, but the space for those games seems to be long gone. I hope it comes back someday, and I hope I can be part of that.

EGREGORE

First-person adventure game where you uncover an occult conspiracy by manipulating nodes on a graph to shape your reality.

Currently working alongside a design/narrative team of 4 in a larger team of ~20 students to develop the central experience of a graph-based puzzle game.

Cards of heart

Cozy Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-based deckbuilding RPG

Currently working as a designer in a 5-student subteam of a 33-student team to design the game systems of a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-based card RPG.

DINOSAUR DRESS-UP

Personal project

A semi-educational personal project in which you can "dress up" a raptor skeleton, creating a collage of how raptor reconstructions were done over the years. Set to release early 2024.