I'm a game developer with a passion for the experimental. I focus on systems, gameplay, and design research as I grow as an artist at USC's Game Development program.Click on my featured projects to the right, or use the top buttons to navigate to something more specific.

PAPERBONES

Deeply personal dinosaur collage dress-up game. I started this in July 2023, and finished July 2024. 90% of it was complete in the first month of development, but I had trouble writing the accompanying poem.
There's a more comprehensive reflection on my itch.io, but the short version is that I got super self-concious about my own identity until I finally learned to just bite the bullet and accept how I felt about the game.

SKYGLOW

A platformer where you play as a cat returning the stars to the sky, and stopping light pollution in a coastal forest town.Made for IndieCade Climate jam 2024 as part of their game design internship program. I handled and led technical production during the jam's 5-week runtime, and programmed a lot of the game's key systems.
Our team of 9 won the Jammer's Choice award after judging!

EGREGORE

Embark on a first-person adventure to a mysterious café in Cairo. Adopt a new perspective and shape the world to your will through an experimental graph-based puzzle mechanic. Discover an occult conspiracy as you pursue a cult that aims to summon an egregore: a thoughtform that can control reality itself.

Designer

  • Collaborated with design and narrative teams to develop systems incorporating the core graphing mechanic and the occult narrative.

  • Designed non-linear puzzle flows integrated with an equally non-linear environment.

  • Designed, implemented, and set dressed level layouts.

Team size: 35
Spring 2023 - 24
Released on Steam in June 2024!

SHED SKIN, BLEED INK.

A ritual within a game. Write on your [physical] skin to embody the holy prophet of generations past, or defy the fate written out for you as your rebirth approaches.PHOTOSENSITIVITY + FLASH WARNING. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

Co-design and programming, Art direction, UI, Narrative design, Usability.

  • Co-designed and tested the game's experimental body writing mechanic.

  • Designed and implemented a custom dialogue system using scriptable objects.

  • Designed UI, dialogue systems, and dictated the game's art direction.

  • Conducted RITE playtests and used data to improve gameplay.

Team Size: 4
Released September 2024 on itch.io!
Featured in the Melbourne Queer Games Festival 2024 Awards Shortlist.
Awaiting Steam release in 2024-25!

Cards of Heart

A cozy card-battler, top-down RPG, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaching tool. Play as Amalia, a young woman in the fantasy town of Respite, and help her as she struggles with defeating her inner shadows following the loss of a close friend.

Systems Designer

  • Designed, tested, and balanced player cards with the systems design team.

  • Iterated on the card battling system, including progression and enemy design.

  • Integrated cards as rewards for quest system.

  • Facilitated and documented team playtests, and used playtest data to improve system and player experience.

Team Size: 39
Spring 2023 - 24
Published to Steam + itch.io and hosted on kozee.games !

12

Explore the children's MMO Doodlandia one last time. Walk through the final moments of your childhood digital home until the clock strikes 12.

Co-designer, UI Programmer and artist, Environmental Designer, Narrative Designer

  • Designed and implemented core game systems alongside a partner.

  • Conducted weekly playtests to improve gameplay experience.

  • Created and implemented UI based on classic MMO UI.

  • Designed, implemented, and setdressed the game’s layout and environment in Unity, and collaborated with 10+ artists to source character art.

Team Size: 2
November 2023 - January 2024
Published to itch.io!

DERAILED

Travel through a surreal subway system and help its denizens in this walking simulator inspired by Tati's Playtime. But is your destination really more important than the journey?

Co-designer and programmer, Level and Environmental Designer

  • Co-designed and programmed the basis for game systems involving swapping objects and character-object interaction.

  • Worked closely with and directed an artist for character and scene assets.

  • Curated assets to compose level layouts that change based on player-NPC interaction and completion of requests.

Team Size: 3
April 2023
Published to itch.io!

BLINDSIGHTED

Escape your infinitely looping limbo of torment using your muzzle flash to see the demonic amalgamations pursuing you in this fast-paced first-person movement shooter.PHOTOSENSITIVITY + FLASH WARNING. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

Gameplay + Level Designer, Artist

  • Wrote an overall level design philosophy based on fear, linearity, and movement.

  • Designed 3 of 5 level layouts.

  • Illustrated UI and cover assets.

Team Size: 7
Developed in 1 week during July 2022.
Published to itch.io. Placed 5th in gameplay and 10th overall in the Black and White game jam!

Minecraft + chemistry education

An individual formal research study on Minecraft Education Edition and game design for High School chemistry education.

Student researcher

  • Designed an experimental Minecraft- based chemistry map.

  • Conducted formal research playtests with 4 participants.

  • Analyzed data to evaluate effectiveness for High School chemistry education.

  • Wrote and published formal study.

Solo project for the AP Research course.
Developed September 2020-May 2021. Published July 2021.
Cited by 8 as of May 2024.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

I'm an undergraduate student pursuing a BFA in Game Development and Interactive Design at the University of Southern California. I'm also minoring in Media and Social Change and Video Game Programming. At school, I volunteer at USC's Creative Media and Behavioral Health Center as a design researcher, and bridge the gap between students and professors as a student rep.I started with an interest in games research and "serious games", which evolved into a passion for creating games evoking unique responses in players. I want to create experiences that allow players to form emergent relationships with rigidly designed systems, and to create unique systems that challenge the ways players engage with them.I'm also super interested in games as a medium for archives, and archiving games. Specifically childrens' MMOs + virtual worlds - I think it's terrifying that entire worlds that people, including myself, grew up in are just gone.Eventually, I aspire to bring a research perspective to game development, and a games perspective to academic research.Outside of games, you can find me making zines, playing Taiko, customizing clothes, or creating archives of video game lore.

(the "amp" in ampheraptor is from my name. the raptor is from dinosaurs.)

SHED SKIN, BLEED INK.

A ritual within a game. Write on your [physical] skin to embody the holy prophet of generations past, or defy the fate written out for you as your rebirth approaches.PHOTOSENSITIVITY + FLASH WARNING. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

Co-design and programming, Art direction, UI, Narrative design, Usability.

  • Co-designed and tested the game's experimental body writing mechanic.

  • Designed and implemented a custom dialogue system using scriptable objects.

  • Designed UI and dialogue systems, and dictated the game's art direction.

  • Conducted RITE playtests and used data to improve gameplay.

Team Size: 4
Released September 2024 on itch.io!
Featured in the Melbourne Queer Games Festival 2024 Awards Shortlist.
Awaiting Steam release in 2024-25!

Your journey starts in the Observatory, a digital repository storing the tradition of a Prophet reborn many times over to achieve a greater purpose.For the Observatory, I designed and implemented a custom dialogue system through scriptable objects. This was the basis for the game's hefty event system.Players view dialogue in the Observatory through pop-up windows (fed dialogue upon spawning through Dialogue Scriptable Objects), which appear on screen through a list of Event SOs. This allowed dialogue to be tied to in-game events, and change as the player's favor with the Observatory evolved.

How do we judge a player for actions taken outside the game?Through weekly iterative playtesting, we aimed to teach abstract evaluation of the sigils players write on their skin.

The Observatory requires that you, the player, write sigils representing the life of the previous Prophets on their skin.Alongside my teammate, I designed the intermittent surveillance system the Observatory uses to track whether the player is inscribing sigils according to their guidelines.Each sigil is assigned a value based on what it represents to the Observatory.

The player's favor increases/decreases based on whether they evaluate things according to the Observatory's guidelines.
The values of the Observatory are arbitrary, and require narrative investment to understand.This forces players to self-surveil themselves. The more they're engaged with the Observatory's system, the more they follow the game's rules.

Sigils appear around the Observatory, and players must be vigilant in writing them all down.The Observatory prompts you to evaluate the sigil based on its percieved value. Mistakes result in having to slash out certain sigils or parts of your skin.

But what if you choose to disobey the Observatory's prescription for your identity?

Clicking on their own sigil brings players to the Wasteland, a nonsense space and the manifestation of the desecrated bodies of prophets past.
I was responsible for the Wasteland's layout, visuals, and inhabitants.

I exploited Unity's shader graph and skyboxes to create the abstraction you see in the Wasteland.
The resulting effect is a space that appears chaotic at first, but on an aesthetic level that allows players to navigate it.

Previous incarnations of the Prophet, representing different parts of the body and associated emotions, speak to you about the true meaning of the sigils in a last-ditch to break the cycle of reincarnation.

Each character, once they are ready to speak, prompts you to create a sigil of your own, representing your own emotional journey. Will you trust them above your orders from the Observatory, and risk desecrating your skin?

The chaos of the Wasteland was purposeful - we wanted to convey that it was painful, almost to the point of impossibility to traverse. This might've worked a little too well - most playtesters were able to figure out what to walk on without falling, but enough fell off on accident that I would've added some safety rails if I did this over again.
Weirdly enough, the trippy skybox was a result of losing development time due to a medical emergency. I needed something quick that did a lot, and since it did a lot visually, it eliminated the need for any other visual noise.

WHY?

Shed Skin, Bleed Ink is a weird game. It's hard to describe because "experimental" isn't a genre with a lot of precedent, and as for other games that make you write on your skin, I can only think of one. While this game involves finding an identity of your own, we started with shame.Ink stings. Writing on your skin damages it, and once you've written something, it can't be erased (until you have soap or water, that is).
What if making the "wrong" choice in a game was something others could see? Would your choices be different if they had a physical consequence? And how could we push players to submit to a system that wasn't controlled by the game itself?This was a very personal and important game for both of us. Identity wasn't even in our original themes - it started as a museum curation game. But our narrative went through several revisions, and the curation of the museum we imagined in our original drafts transformed into curation of the self. It seems obvious in hindsight: like our Professor Peter Brinson said, we were "doing the body" and forcing players to consider the physical + real consequences of their actions. I wanted to see someone get physically transformed by the game.

EGREGORE

Embark on a first-person adventure to a mysterious café in Cairo. Adopt a new perspective and shape the world to your will through an experimental graph-based puzzle mechanic. Discover an occult conspiracy as you pursue a cult that aims to summon an egregore: a thoughtform that can control reality itself.

Designer

  • Collaborated with design and narrative teams to develop systems incorporating the core graphing mechanic and the occult narrative.

  • Designed non-linear puzzle flows integrated with an equally non-linear environment.

  • Designed, implemented, and set dressed level layouts.

Team size: 35
Spring 2023 - 24
Released on Steam in June 2024!

Game trailer, as of the USC Games Expo on May 7th 2024.

I was responsible for iterating puzzle sequences and creating alternate puzzle flows. During development, we scoped down from a more freeform version of the graphing system to one that requires the player to hit certain checkpoints for "routes".I designed what evolved into 2/3 of the final Café routes, and continually recieved feedback from the lead designer in their development. Together, we revised these sequences to create the final Café Ramses puzzle.Additionally, I blocked out early revisions of the Cairo streets and Café Ramses in-engine, and updated them as puzzle sequences were finalized.This allowed the design team to make the environment appropriately dynamic for the reality-altering puzzles.

An adventure game both evoking and subverting genre classics, Egregore utilizes an experimental mechanic in which players connect nodes in a graph to change the world around them.
I was a designer in a team of 35, working on core systems, level layouts, and puzzle flows. We were met with an incredible reception at this year's USC Games Expo, and both those familiar with the genre and not were pleasantly surprised by the graphing mechanic.

My work:

Over the year, I developed all 3 major sequences (tutorial, Café Ramses, and Sanctum) and the graphing system they use alongside the design and narrative teams.
Here's a few sample puzzle sequences I worked on. Hover over/click them to learn more.

Sample setdressing for the "linear" Sanctum sequence.
The goal was to create an unsettling cult-like environment in an abandoned mall, an eerie mirror to the lively Cairo streets.

Cards of Heart

A cozy card-battler, top-down RPG, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaching tool. Play as Amalia, a young woman in the fantasy town of Respite, and help her as she struggles with her mental health and defeating her inner shadows.

Systems Designer

  • Designed, tested, and balanced player cards with the systems design team.

  • Iterated on the card battling system, including progression and enemy design.

  • Integrated cards as rewards for quest system.

  • Facilitated and documented team playtests, and used playtest data to improve system and player experience.

Team Size: 39
Spring 2023 - 24
Published to Steam + itch.io and hosted on kozee.games!

I collaborated with the design team to create the cards Amalia uses in battle. We designed around several player archetypes, reflecting how one might deal with their mental health, and deckbuilding strategies seen in other card games like Slay the Spire and Magic: The Gathering.Above is a sample of my thought process when designing cards to fit the Aggro/damage-dealing archetype. Empowerment is the stat that's focused on attacking, so I created cards that would supplement the existing pure attack cards.

As a systems designer, I met with the systems team of 4 weekly to playtest and iterate on the game's core card battling system.

Cards were split into 3 stats, doubling as the player character Amalia's "health", and had chain types related to the activities Amalia must go through to receive those cards. Our process was to imagine archetypes players might embody, make cards based on them, and select and edit the final cards we'd add to the game's total spread.

We adjusted card costs, abilities, and chains to balance the overall card distribution and their effectiveness against Amalia's shadows. I contributed to card balancing through playtesting and adjusting values based on gameplay.Hope allows Amalia to "heal" and replenish her stats, Empowerment to attack the shadow, and Connectedness gave her buffs and the shadows debuffs, each playing to a different player archetype. Together, the systems team balanced the overall card spread to create strategies between cards for easy and fun deckbuilding that made sense from a mental health standpoint.

Connectedness cards are rare early game, as the stat represents Amalia's sense of belonging in her hometown. As the player completes quests and forms a connection with the residents of Respite, Amalia now has a more diverse range of tools to combat the shadow, and a the player has wider array of cards to strategize with when deckbuilding. Other cards were integrated into quests based on the quest's actions or the questgiver's personality.

This is an early brainstorm of Amalia's stats, and how they play into different archetypes. My commentary is in teal. I was particularly concerned with the game's mental health aspect, and all my goal as a systems designer was to create a balanced and fun fantasy system that maintained a basis in mental health reality.

12

Explore the children's MMO Doodlandia one last time. Walk through the final moments of your childhood digital home until the clock strikes 12.

Co-designer, UI Programmer and artist, Environmental Designer, Narrative Designer

  • Designed and implemented core game systems, iteratively improved with weekly playtesting.

  • Created and implemented UI based on classic MMO UI.

  • Designed, implemented, and setdressed the game’s layout and environment in Unity, and collaborated with 10+ artists to source character art.

Team Size: 2
November 2023 - January 2024
Published to itch.io!

12 started as a 2-week design exercise in evoking emotion through gameplay, and evolved into a 5+ week project.
You, the player, log 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 to the game before the clock strikes 12 and the magic disappears.

I handled UI design and programming, most of the game's art and environment. and narrative design. This was a heavily personal project for both of us, and large design and narrative choices were made jointly.We had both recently played PRINCESS INTERNET CAFE's Running Back to You, a game made for the Dying MMO Jam.
Taking heavy inspiration from it, the two games share a lot of narrative themes. Much of this was unintentional, but as we were trying to convey a 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.

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

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. Until the clock strikes 12 (6 in-game minutes), they explore the island, it's inhabitants, and through it, the role Doodlandia had in their lives.
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.

  • How do we create a game system that emulates a pre-existing one without any of that system's elements?

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 talking to playtesters and reflecting on our own experiences, 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 emotion was born from a loss of community and a world that was built by many people - something that wasn't inherent to any game itself.

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, and hid a tutorial within it - the player can click the arrows on the side to get "hints" on how to play the game.

The login screen serves as an introduction to the game.

This UI was an exercise in accessible design while pushing aesthetics to an extreme.

Here's a sample of icons/illustrations I created!

ENVIRONMENT

To save time making assets, we decided to create a 3D environment and combined assets from poly.pizza and Sketchfab. I also illustrated 2D "paper" assets to enhance the doodly feel of the game.
I put together the environment, taking inspiration mainly from Fer.al's fantastical forest landscapes.

I used a lot of craft supplies, crystals, and fantasy trees in the environment. 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 - seeing the world from both the perspective of a child and an adult.

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.I wanted to make the player feel like they were falling asleep into a dream.

Since the game ran under a strict 6-minute timer, my goal was an evocative environment that was navigable before time ran out, which I achieved!
Some chose to spend more time in certain areas, and others went around the map to see everything, which created a unique experience for everyone who played 12.

NARRATIVE

The overall narrative of 12 was created between both my teammate and I. 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 during playtesting, so we leaned into the emotions it evoked.

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

Dialogue was altered to resemble internet speech of the time: a lot of mixed case letters, leetspeak, and abbreviations were used to write dialogue that felt like it was coming from someone else playing the game.

I also wrote bios for each of the 50+ NPC avatars the player meets in-game. This was based on the art provided by over 10 of our friends of their characters [:

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 represent your childhood self.
This was pretty impromptu - we had used this asset as a placeholder for the player character, but grew increasingly attached to swirlcat.

POSTMORTEM REFLECTION

Both my teammate and I 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 actual gameplay, but the community 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. I wanted to capture this experience.As a 6-16 year-old, I met strangers who I was close with for hours, only to lose them when we both logged off. But I also made some of my closest friends after bonding over the loss of these worlds. I think there's a beauty in the ephemerality of these relationships - between the fragility of something only brought together by the digital.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. Despite the game still existing, everything felt so different from when I was a kid. The game itself hadn’t changed much since 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.

DERAILED

Travel through a surreal subway system and help its denizens in this walking simulator inspired by Tati's Playtime.But is your destination really more important than the journey?

Co-designer and programmer, Level and Environmental Designer

  • Co-designed and programmed the basis for game systems involving swapping objects and character-object interaction.

  • Worked closely with and directed an artist for character and scene assets.

  • Curated assets to compose level layouts that change based on player-NPC interaction and completion of requests.

Team Size: 3
April 2023
Published to itch.io!

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 create the in-game environments. This included a pickup and object swapping system. Throughout the 4-week development cycle, I updated the game's 18-page game design document which detailed every level's objective, characters, and theming.

Inspired by Tati's Playtime, I wanted the game to start with a fairly straightforward and monotonous feel, and gradually become more energetic and playful. As the player helps the subway system's denizens, it transforms into something evocative of a child's bedroom.

Playthrough by YouTuber Queen Faith Official.

BLINDSIGHTED

Escape your infinitely looping limbo of torment using your muzzle flash to see the demonic amalgamations pursuing you in this fast-paced first-person movement shooter.PHOTOSENSITIVITY + FLASH WARNING. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

Gameplay + Level Designer, Artist

  • Wrote an overall level design philosophy based on fear, linearity, and movement.

  • Designed 3 of 5 level layouts.

  • Illustrated UI and cover assets.

Team Size: 7
Developed in 1 week during July 2022.
Published to itch.io. Placed 5th in gameplay and 10th overall in the Black and White game jam!

UI gun icons I illustrated.

Our team's goal was to create something that both fit the first-person movement shooter genre but subverted it in the ways players interacted with their environment. This was achieved with the muzzle flash mechanic, the player's fast movement, and the infinite looping of levels. I wrote an 8-page level design philosophy based on inducing fear, diverting from expectations of linearity, and giving players satisfying movement options. This informed how we developed the game in the 7 days left of the jam.
Blindsighted placed 5th in gameplay, 6th in originality, and 10th overall in the 2022 Black and White Game Jam.

This jam was my first comprehensive dive into level design. The first 3 days were set for pre-production, in which I researched movement shooter gameplay to write design guidelines for the rest of the development process. This informed the levels I designed, which I sketched out in a notebook during a road trip, working with the rest of my team remotely. The overall process was fairly casual, but through it, I learned a lot about the level design process and the first-person shooter genre.

Minecraft + chemistry education

An individual formal research study on Minecraft Education Edition and game design for High School chemistry education.

Student researcher

  • Designed an experimental Minecraft- based chemistry map.

  • Conducted formal research playtests with 4 participants.

  • Analyzed data to evaluate effectiveness for High School chemistry education.

  • Wrote and published formal study.

Solo project for the AP Research course.
Developed September 2020-May 2021. Published July 2021.
Cited by 8 as of May 2024.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

As part of the AP Research course, I conducted a study on Minecraft Education Edition's applications for high-school chemistry learning. Over the year, this involved creating a Minecraft map based on past game-based education research, recruiting playtesters for the map, observing how they learned, and documenting and analyzing the results. The study was published in the Journal of Student Research and has been cited 8 times as of May 2024.