SCRAP SQUAD

Scrap Squad casts players in the role of a mad scientist as part of a frantic fun-on-the-run action game.  Players start out with a secret lab, a few clunker robots and a simple mission to match up falling objects.  As the robots convert trash to cash to finance your nefarious plans, the conveyor belt accelerates, challenging players to upgrade their army of ‘bots for speed and efficiency.  As players earn more and more money, they can unlock tons of upgrades - making them the envy of mad scientists worldwide!

As studio director, I managed the development process for Scrap Squad from concept to completion.  Working in concert with Relevant Games (our publisher) allowed us to create unique and fun gameplay while maintaining Relevant’s goal of designing games with higher, meaningful purposes.  Recycling trash by swiping it around the screen felt very natural, and sorting was a unique game mechanic that gave our game an edge in originality.

I designed and implemented the UI for this game, using NGUI in Unity and coded in C#.  The challenge was to iterate and constantly improve designs while learning a totally new UI system.  I also worked extensively on the backend, integrating with 3rd party APIs including Facebook, Game Center, and iCloud while constantly performing testing and bug fixing. 

Scrap Squad was featured by Apple globally and nominated for an International Mobile Game Award in Best Meaningful Play.

FREEDOM FLOCK

COMING SOON TO A SKY NEAR YOU!  Fight for freedom and protect mankind from the forces of evil by managing your ever-growing network of carrier pigeons delivering packages worldwide.  Protect the privacy of global communication by unleashing your freedom flock to overcome the prying eyes of ‘Big Brother.’  

FEATURES

• Nintendo inspired bright and fun art style
• Strategic gameplay - design your network cleverly to earn more coins
• Equip accessories to birds to fit your play style
• Perfect for all ages!

Freedom Flock is scheduled for release in 2016.  I worked primarily on project management and creative direction, with an emphasis on user interface and integrating 3rd party plugins to allow for notifications, as well as constant playtesting.  

PICKAXE PLUNDER

Master the art of endless arcade mining and gathering gems in Pickaxe Plunder!  Smash potions and cast spells to enchant your shining stones as you bury yourself with a hoard of sparkling gems.  Need more loot?  Blow the ‘great horn’ and lift money right out of the dirt!  

Rubies, sapphires and emeralds await you, grab your pickaxe and get cracking!

I focused primarily on visual effects, developing an entirely custom pipeline to simulate in Cinema 4D the physics driven falling and creation of the gem pile seen on the score screen.  Given the performance constraints of mobile platforms, I engineered a system to export accurate simulated falling objects and render them all in-engine, saving large amounts of memory and graphics performance and producing a rather complex animation.

We reused the game geometry to create the environment seen in the marketing art.  The background was lit and rendered using GI to bring out the details.  The gem pile was created in Cinema, as well as character renders.  Our art director, Donovan Valdes performed the final composite and cleanups in photoshop.

IBM - Tivoli Deployment Tool UI / UX

I worked on the UI/UX design of this project with the goal of simplifying the often very complex job of deploying a set of Tivoli monitoring tools across an enterprise server environment.  This particular set of monitoring tools can scale from a single machine all the way to tens of thousands of systems.  

This tool guides users through the setup process and condenses a large series of consideration into a few simple questions.  On the backend, it leverages existing product deployment tools to perform the install and tuning for customers—thus improving their deployment time and reducing the need for support. 

Forgotten Frontiers

In January 2014, my brother located a cache of letters from the Great Depression that ultimately revealed the largest unknown conspiracy of the New Deal era.  After nearly two years of intensive research and retrieving thousands of previously unexamined documents in the National Archives, I helped him create the visual assets required to both explain the discovery and generate publicity.  The challenge was to create a comprehensive website explaining—in layman’s terms—a field of historical study currently unknown to scholars. 

The website introduces visitors to the unknown history of Big Bend National Park and is designed to lead visitors from page to page and explore an alternative narrative of Texas’ first and largest national park.

In addition to web material, we created supplemental material for use at trade shows such as handouts, giving people a tangible item with highlights about our discovery intended to drive traffic to our website where we'd collect contact info and get people more involved by driving them towards social media.

www.forgottenfrontiers.com